


Deimos

by sarensen



Series: The Sound of Broken Glass [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (hux deserves it), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, OMC - Freeform, Swearing, action!bb-8, eldritch creatures from the deepest abyss, everyone is still ridiculously extra, feat. a special appearance by almost every cliche in the history of sci fi, feat. kylo ren’s massive dick, hux is a shit, hux is an ambitious fuck who has trouble knowing where to draw the line, hux is starting to suspect kylo ren might not be cut out for a leadership position, hux is still a human disaster, knights of ren cameo, kylo does not have a handle on his emotions, less gore but still a little bit, listen leia does not deserve any of this, people are constantly trying to murder hux, rey takes no shit, the return of xn-336
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 21:04:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 74,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7699306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarensen/pseuds/sarensen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hux and Ren return to the Finalizer to find a splinter faction has risen, sowing seeds of doubt in the First Order’s new management in a bid to seize power for themselves.<br/>In a desperate attempt to unite the fractured Order, Hux launches a full-scale attack on the Resistance, but a message from General Organa herself calls for a truce, warning of a new danger: a threat to the very nature of the Force itself. The Order and the Resistance must set aside their differences and join forces to defeat it, or run the risk of losing everything.<br/>With Hux’s precarious hold on power over the First Order and the death of Han Solo still a fresh wound between Leia and Kylo Ren, the alliance is fragile at best, and can only show its true strength by dividing in unexpected ways.<br/>But time is running out, and in the turbulent peace and lingering distrust on both sides, only one thing is for certain: The Deimos are coming. Death is coming. And losing this fight is not an option.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Tips for surviving the First Order by General Hux, #12: Turn your back for one second and someone will try to stab you in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Previously on [The Sound of Broken Glass](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7041142/chapters/16013578): Hux’s ass lures Kylo Ren from the control of his master. There are also bombs.*
> 
> Now...

_[[ FINALIZER security feed, deck 33-a, officers’ quadrant, camera 14b-2 | personal quarters/refresher, General Hux, A. ]]_  
_[[ Galactic Standard Time, offset 473 / 23:06 ]]_  
_< <audio privacy filter enabled>>_  
  
A square of paler grey flares, overexposed and slicing into shades of austere black. The shadow of a man bleeds through it as he steps into the room. Sensing movement, the lights in the room automatically brighten to 70%, illuminating a simple sink, mirror and rack. Indiscriminate black clothing drapes neatly over the edge of a hamper, one sock crawling its lonely way across the floor. The man is towelling wet hair, has another towel wound around his waist. A pair of dogtags glistens against his ribs. His left shoulder is bound with bacta tape, translucent in patches where water has soaked through it. The pale skin on his back is bruised and criss-crossed with the fine lines of fresh scars.  
  
He steps through the door.  
  
Lights dim to 0%.  
  
  
  
_[[ camera 14b-4 | personal quarters/berth, General Hux, A. ]]_  
  
\--and brighten automatically to 60% in the adjacent room, the stark corners and harsh lines of a sparsely-furnished berth bleeding into view. Both towels go over the back of a tall leather chair, neatly folded, and then the man starts to dress: a dark sleeveless tank, pulled gingerly over his injured shoulder to hide the dogtags; a pair of regulation briefs and jodhpurs carefully tugged and prodded until they flare just right. The mattress dips as he sits down on the bed to pull on long military boots, shone to reflecting and tightly hugging his calves. The zip of the second is halfway up when the man tenses, his head jerking up towards the door. He half raises off the bed--  
  
  
  
_[[ camera 14a-1 | personal quarters/antechamber, General Hux, A. ]]_  
  
Lights glare at 90% in the entrance chamber of his quarters. Six Stormtroopers are arrayed beside the front door, now open where seconds ago, it had been securely locked. Their white armour glistens, the overhead lights reflecting shiny distorted shapes over their pauldrons. Rifles sit lightly in the crooks of their arms; feet spread hip-width. They stare straight ahead with the purposeful blankness of parade rest.  
  
One white helmet tilts slightly in the direction of the entryway to the berth as the man with wet hair and a bandaged shoulder appears there. He is yelling, looks angry. The other Stormtroopers give no indication of noticing him; do not move at all until an officer steps through the main door from the corridor outside. (He is heavy-set, hands folded neatly behind his back, a commander’s hat perched on light hair. He seems calm, collected, everything the man with wet hair is not. His back is to the camera.)  
  
The Stormtroopers salute, fists thumping against their chestplates.  
  
There is a short, one-sided row (consisting mostly of the man with wet hair yelling and the officer not reacting) which ends when the officer raises his left hand in a sharp gesture. A General’s command stripes adorn the sleeve of his uniform tunic. At the gesture, the Stormtroopers’ rifles lift as one, aimed straight and true at the man with wet hair, and he looks suddenly defeated. When he lifts both arms in surrender, two Stormtroopers break the line to grab him, wrenching his hands behind his back.  
  
They drag him out of the room and the officer turns to follow, his face revealed on the camera for a second.  
  
He is smiling.  
  
  
  
_[[ camera 17-c | maintenance corridor 57-d_ _]]_  
_[[ GST.473 / 23:12 ]]_  
_< <audio feed enabled>>_  
  
“What is this about?” the man with wet hair says. His voice is very loud, intonation spiking unnaturally as he jerks in the Stormtroopers’ arms, trying to break free. “I will not tolerate this kind of insubordination on my ship.”  
  
“ _Your_ ship?” says the officer, trailing behind, then goes quiet. They round the corner and he leans over to tap the entry code for the elevator into the keypanel on the wall. His security clearance level is high; the coordinates for the ship-long shaft leading to the command bridge flash onto the LED.  
  
“How did you get the override codes to my personal quarters?” the man with wet hair asks, bearing to his left to try and jostle the Stormtroopers’ grasp. When that doesn’t work he tries kicking, but the ‘troopers’ shin guards do what they are meant to, and it’s not effective. “Unhand me!” he shouts, a patch of dark color blooming under the bandage on his shoulder; a newly opened wound.  
  
The officer looks on with a calm expression and says, “There’s been a slew of reconditioning after the rebellion of FN-2187. Do you know how easy it is to change reconditioning codes?”  
  
The man with wet hair abruptly stops struggling, twisting his head around to look back at the officer. A ping as the elevator arrives; a soft hiss as the doors slide open.  
  
As he herds his soldiers and their captive into the elevator, the officer continues mildly, “These ‘troopers are no longer loyal to General Hux.”  
  
The man with wet hair snarls. “Why you fucking piece of--”  
  
The elevator doors slide shut.  
  
  
  
_[[ deck 89-c, camera 1-a | command bridge]]_  
_[[ GST.473 / 23:28 ]]_  
_< <audio feed enabled>>_  
  
“--no good insolent Rathtar-spawned piece of garbage!”    
  
The elevator doors slide open onto the command bridge. The officer, who had been looking at his wristwatch, steps out of the elevator, lowering his hand and allowing the Stormtroopers to drag their captive out of the cramped cubicle. “Are you done?”  
  
“I’ll kill every single one of you!”  
  
“Yes, thank you, Armitage.” He nods his chin towards the central walkway of the command bridge, onto which the Stormtroopers drag their prisoner (who tries to headbut one, and cuts his cheekbone on the edge of her pauldron when she dodges). They force the man to his knees. His bare arms strain in their hold as they clasp a pair of binders around his wrists, stepping back, but keeping their grip on his shoulders. The man’s hair (no longer dripping) hangs over his eyes.  
  
Near the door, a large Stormtrooper in reflective armour is being held immobile by several fellow soldiers. They have difficulty keeping their grasp on chrome arms: she is heavy, and strong, and years of running countless drills and battle simulations under her have given them intimate insight into the lengths she is willing to go to to protect the First Order. They do not take it lightly. A strip of black cloth cuts into the corners of her mouth, disappearing around her head into close-cropped, light hair. One ‘trooper has his rifle trained on her.  
  
More Stormtroopers stand guard over the bridge personnel - petty officers manning the flight controls, maintenance droids working on repairing the connectors of the Finalizer’s damaged cannons, and higher ranking personnel whose loyalties had until recently been unchallenged, huddling in groups near their respective command terminals. The myriad blinking lights signalling the ship’s various needs go ignored.  
  
They look on with trepidation as another officer, an older gentleman with dark hair and the posture of a man who has spent a lifetime in the military, turns from his contemplation of the stars outside the viewport and walks toward the kneeling man.  
  
He, too, wears a General’s command stripes on his left sleeve.  
  
The kneeling man snarls, his body jerking towards the officer as though he might break free. A thin trail of blood curves down his cheek. “Kaplan. I should have known. Only a snake like you would sink so low as to conspire with a worm like Rodinon.”  
  
“General Hux,” replies the elder officer, “Or should I say, ex-General. Can I call you Armitage?”  
  
“The only thing you should be calling is a medical droid.”  
  
“There have been a few changes while you were away, Armitage,” the dark-haired officer continues, unperturbed.  
  
The prisoner’s face twists into a mask of disgust. “I’ve been away less than a week,” he says, then adds, “Though a week, it would seem, is long enough for rats to infest my bridge.”  
  
The officer with light hair, who had stepped aside, deferring to the elder officer and lapsing into parade rest, loses some of his composure. His hands clench at his sides. “You abandoned us,” he hisses, leaning in towards the kneeling man a bit. “You left. Starkiller Base went to shit, and you left. Do you know what it’s like to watch the world shake itself to pieces right under your feet? To see soldiers, friends, disintegrate into shadows in fires hot enough to melt durasteel? We had to drag ourselves out of that hell, Hux. And where were you?”  
  
The officer with dark hair is watching quietly, arms folded over his chest. The first leans in very close, pressing his forefinger into the kneeling man’s injured shoulder. “You ran, cowering like the dog you are. Someone had to take control of the Finalizer. Someone had to pick up the pieces. Thousands dead. Many more injured. And you, gone. What makes you think you can just saunter back in here now like nothing happened?”  
  
“I was following orders,” the ex-General says, enunciating every word carefully and looking up to meet the officer’s eyes, “Something I gather you don’t know much about.”  
  
The officer uses the back of his hand to strike the captive’s face. Near the entryway, the Stormtrooper in reflective armour yells inarticulately, muffled by the gag. She struggles anew, ineffectively; ‘troopers in white subdue her almost immediately, renewing their already tight grips on her shoulders and arms.  
  
The kneeling man spits to the side, a splattering of dark blood soiling the shiny floor, then returns his glare to the officers who have had him restrained. They are standing side by side now, looking down on him as he bares his teeth in a bloody grimace.  
  
“It’s time to absolve you of your duties, General Hux,” says the elder officer. The other unholsters the blaster strapped to his waist. (In the background the chrome Stormtrooper surges up, dislodging three ‘troopers before a fourth uses the butt of his rifle against the back of her head, striking hard. She slumps to the ground.)  
  
The ex-General’s eyes are now fixed on the blaster. Its owner, leveling the barrel an inch away from his forehead, says, “It’s time for a change of leadership.”  
  
“If you were at all capable of running the Finalizer, _Lieutenant_ ,” the captive says, only the slightest shake in his voice betraying any sign of fear, “I’d have promoted you to Captain years ago. Besides, you have a new Supreme Leader now. I doubt he’d agree to a sudden change in management.”  
  
“Ah yes,” says the dark-haired officer, folding his hands behind his back, “your message was clear on that point, though not precisely on how Kylo Ren came to take the Supreme Leader’s position in the first place.” He snorts, seeming amused. “Really, Kylo Ren? He is a child. A destructive, impulsive child, cowering under the Supreme Leader’s authority like an abused dog.”  
  
The officer holding the blaster adds, “I’d rather eat my own hand than take orders from him.”  
  
“He’s about to be demoted,” the first officer concludes, dismissively, “And so are you. Though,” - here he pauses to smile, with too many teeth, as though he is not used to the gesture - “I think your crimes against the Order merit a rather more serious punishment.”  
  
“There are some problems that require a more... permanent solution,” says the officer holding the blaster. “We’re going to make an example out of you, Armitage Hux. For the crimes of failing to protect the First Order’s most valuable weaponized asset, and for abandoning your post in a time of disaster; a dishonourable discharge, compliments of the Order’s new leaders.”  
  
The captive man’s mouth flattens into a line, brows knitting together as he lifts his gaze from the barrel of the blaster to their faces. “Everything I have done has been for the good of the First Order. If you must kill me, then kill me, but know this. The Order will die with me. You will ruin everything we have worked for. Starkiller Base was but one defeat in a war we can win, but only if we retaliate now. We don’t have time for this nonsense. You need me. With my guidance, the attack on the Resistance will be successful, and the glory of our victory will--”  
  
“Oh, shut up, Armitage,” the elder officer interrupts, and gestures, sharply. The other officer raises his blaster a fraction, and pulls the trigger. Light erupts from the barrel, the bright flash and high-pitched flare of the laser pulse illuminating the dark tones of the bridge in over-exposed hues of white--

 

_[[ camera feed lost, attempting to recover… ]]_

_[[ attempting to recover… ]]_

_[[ recovery failed. system reboot Y/N? >> ]] _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Summary of [_Gottmord_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7041142/chapters/16013578) provided by the delightful [grue](http://archiveofourown.org/users/grue/profile).
> 
> Alright alright alright alright, here we go! It’s the mostly unanticipated sequel to the fic no one read in the first place! :D  
> I honestly had such a blast writing _Gottmord_ that I started actively missing spending time with these two assholes when it finished, so, I guess, this happened. Sorry, for what it’s worth.
> 
> I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my best friend, G, for not only putting up with, but *actively encouraging* this garbage. If it weren’t for his unending patience and support, I would certainly not have been able to get this far. So G, this one’s for you - I am deeply grateful for your motivation and inspiration, and deeply sorry for the amount of dick I have inflicted on you the past few months :P


	2. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a hand

Stepping onto the Finalizer is like walking face-first into a wall of misery. The metallic tang of blood thickens the air and Kylo finds it suddenly hard to breathe as they wait for their shuttle’s disembarkation ramp to hit the durasteel floor.

The docking bay is a warren of activity, officers and Stormtroopers scurrying between blood-smeared gurneys lining the walls. Injured personnel, ‘troopers and officers from the ruins of Starkiller Base are cordoned off in temporary med bays, separated by sails cobbled together from polyweave and spare support beams. An entire planet’s worth of First Order soldiers and engineers and research specialists and kitchen staff and sanitation personnel; hundreds of new minds crowding the docking hangar of Hux’s star destroyer.

She overflows with the wounded and dying, desperation and fear and pain clawing at Kylo’s mind like sharp-pincered, crawling insects. They press against his defenses, a thousand shadowy hands silhouetted against his psychic walls. Kylo takes a deep breath, inching a bit closer to Hux. (Hux’s mind is, as always, a brand of anger and resolve - a little disgust - and pure, focused energy; a torch lighting the way in the darkness.)

Phasma meets them at the bottom of the ramp, chrome helmet tucked beneath one elbow. Her face is drawn, shadows purpling the skin beneath her eyes. Kylo gets the impression that she’s been like a ship lost at sea, overwhelmed and desperate for guidance; that she’s relieved to see Hux, feels like she can breathe again for the first time in a while. She’s done what she could, with the help of Hux’s subordinates, but she’s tired. Hux has been needed here, sorely, and here he is - he’ll know what to do. He’ll fix this, somehow. He always does.

Hux takes one look at Phasma and starts barking orders. He invests himself completely in finding out the current status of his ship and personnel for the next few minutes, and with his attention fully focused on something other than Kylo, Kylo finds his interest wandering.

He stares around the hangar; tries not to count the wounded. He’s no stranger to death at this scale, to the smell of decaying flesh and the heavy warmth of sickness; not to the heartache and exhaustion of those left behind, alive. He turns in a slow circle, hands clenched at his sides, and sees Stormtroopers dying, officers dying.

His very first lesson with Snoke had been this: There is no death. There is only the Force. For those few blessed with the power of the Darkness, death is but another step in the endless journey of consciousness. 

These people are not so lucky.

Feeling Hux’s energy slip off his radar, he turns to find him and Phasma on the other end of the hangar. Kylo senses that they are headed towards one of the larger medbays on Deck 4; Hux’s shoulder is causing him a lot of pain. 

He glances at the myriad of dead and nearly-dead around him, weighing the promise of medical treatment against having to wade through the quagmire of all these minds to get there, and chooses peace. The lightsaber burn on his face and the bowcaster wound in his side still smart when he moves, but he's had worse. Probably. At some point he can't quite remember right now.

Refugees from Starkiller Base have been sequestered to the large, open docking hangars of the Finalizer so she can still operate, and when Kylo ducks out into the nearest corridor it's blessedly cold and quiet.

The ship’s sterile overhead lights guide Kylo past familiar wall consoles and interrogation rooms. He ducks quickly through the mess hall and clambers over a tangle of thick rubber tubes hiding emergency wiring; stabs the right coordinates into the elevator’s keypad without looking. It spits him out into familiar territory, his steps quickening as he nears his personal quarters.

It’s quiet and dark inside, the welcoming cold a familiar and peaceful embrace. The doors hiss shut behind him, dulling the urgency of the pained and desperate minds on the lower decks. Slumping back against the cold durasteel, he breathes a quiet sigh of relief.

Home, or the closest he’s known to it in a very long time.

On their dimmest setting, the lights are still too bright for him, so he leaves them off as he steps inside. He pauses briefly in the antechamber, reaching out to rest his fingertips on his grandfather’s mask as he always does, echoes of the searing heat that destroyed it whispering up his arm. 

Vader’s voice does not speak to him today, or perhaps he’s too exhausted to hear it.

He finds his way to his berth by memory, trailing his fingers along the wall. His small bed is narrow, and too short for him to fit on properly, but it dents into a perfect inverse impression of his body when he collapses onto it, burying his face in the familiar smell of the pillows.

As he feels the dark and the quiet envelop him like a shroud, he allows the ebb and flow of the Force to rise inside of him, carrying him like an ocean. Its gentle waves wash over him; through him. And there it is, like he knew it would be: an emptiness deep inside of him that was not there before. Two gaping holes, where Han Solo and Supreme Leader used to be. The Force does not fill these holes, though he’d expected it to: he’d waited for the Darkness to come rushing in, wanting it more than he can remember wanting anything else. He waited, and it never came. He remained empty, and slowly, guilt started to fill those holes. It sits in the pit of his stomach now, a heavy and growling thing, hating him.

He’d raged at Hux on the shuttle back to the Finalizer, for killing Leader Snoke, for tearing another hole in Kylo, though Kylo had thought he wanted it. The plan didn’t work, it didn't make him stronger. It only made him hollow. 

Hux had sat and watched while Kylo raged, calm and unafraid in the face of Kylo’s temper, all but a statue of white marble and copper. Kylo’s violence washed up against him, rushed over him, and Hux merely crossed his arms and waited. And so Kylo had raged and raged until he couldn’t remember why he was raging anymore, until the only thing he had left to be angry at was himself - and then he had fallen asleep slumped against Hux’s shoulder.

But Hux is not here now, and whatever temporary balm he’d lined Kylo’s emptiness with has gone with him, leaving Kylo alone with his sadness and self-hate.

The Dark Side has abandoned him, and in its wake, he is weak, small and alone. Pathetic. He shouldn’t be grieving at all. Shouldn’t be empty. Killing Han Solo and Supreme Leader should have made him more powerful. Their deaths were to fuel the fire of his power. Instead, they weigh him down with a sense of deep regret he hadn’t thought himself capable of. Not anymore.

He claws at the front of his shirt as if he can dig his fingers into the holes inside himself. His chest aches with it, aches with loneliness and the disappointment in his father’s eyes the last time he looked at him, with Snoke’s last breath, drawn in the moment before he disintegrated right in front of Kylo’s eyes. The pain and anger make his power surge; overhead, the lights flicker to life. 

The gentle ocean of the Force rises in him like a quicktide, filling his lungs and surging up his throat, a swirling vortex fueled by his rage and too vast too contain, too quick, and Kylo has to curl in on himself because every muscle in his body starts to contract, pulling in on itself painfully until he is a tense ball of quivering, unreleased energy. Trying to meditate was a mistake. He forgot how easily the Force latches onto emotion, how it loves violence; always waiting at the edges of his defenses, waiting to rush in and overwhelm him. He has to let it out, or it will consume him; swallow him whole if he doesn’t focus. 

He’s on his feet now, somehow, the Force surging out of him in bursts he is too emotionally distraught to contain. He can only sit back helplessly and watch from the confines of his mind as the bolted-down bed is ripped from the floor, metal hinges screaming, and tossed across the room. The heavy steel desk crumples like paper beneath his power; dents the wall as it crashes into it. Sheafs of paper and shards of metal and his blanket swirl around him and if he doesn’t find his focus, he’s going to lose himself to this. He concentrates, dragging his attention into a singular point. Then the name comes unbidden to him again, rising from the mist of the Force to whisper: Hux.

Hux, with his fiery personality and beautiful hair, who deceived him into believing killing Snoke was the right thing, because that's what Hux is good at. Manipulating people. Hux, who found Kylo in pieces in the snow and held him together with the sheer force of his irritation. Who, despite everything, has been the only person in Kylo’s life never to look at him with any fear. 

(Even Supreme Leader knew his true power; Kylo could sense it in the way he talked to him, always so careful to shield himself, so careful to inspire fear of himself in Kylo so Kylo would never try to break him. But not Hux. On the first day they met, Hux watched him torture a prisoner in the most invasive ways possible, and didn't find it fearful or impressive, didn't even thank him for the information. He'd looked annoyed, and asked why it took so long.)

The sudden need to find him sharpens to a pinpoint in the front of his mind, a focus, and the storm of his emotions suddenly abates. Everything drops to the floor. Chest heaving, he slumps over, resting his palms on his knees. He's the only thing left standing in a sea of debris.

Droids can take care of it. He whirls around and stalks to the door, intent on finding Hux, though he's not exactly sure what he'll do with him when he does. Make him apologize, maybe, although that did not end successfully before. Shake him very hard, perhaps, for being the way he is, or at the very least, give him a good talking to (without getting distracted by the curve of his mouth and ending the conversation with one party’s tongue stuck down the other’s throat this time).

He jams his palm onto the keypad--

Nothing. He blinks, trying again, more gently this time. 

Still nothing.

He closes his eyes, reaching out with the Force, but instead of the busy static buzz of electricity behind the steel of the door, dancing and alive, he's met with… quiet. 

A malfunction? Hux’s ship hardly ever breaks, and even when it does, five minutes do not pass without technicians swarming all over the fault, their slightly-panicked energy reeking. 

Kylo stretches his senses further, down endless power lines and through a myriad control consoles, and there, at the very faintest frayed edges of the crawling coils of circuitry and hubs and ports, he finds it: a single seed of malintent.

Dread settles in Kylo’s stomach as he pulls back into himself, opening his eyes. He tries the comms, mashing his forefinger into the button a few times, just in case. 

Dead.

Someone has tried to lock him in. Him. Kylo Ren. It would be almost laughable if it weren't so very  _ wrong _ . This is  _ his _ ship, his and Hux’s. Someone on his crew wants him out of the way. And the only reason they'd want him out of the way...

He flings out a hand. The door buckles, then blasts outward with a loud screech of protest, crashing into the opposite wall of the corridor. He sends his senses ahead, and immediately feels the presence of two Stormtroopers right outside. They are wavery forms of blue smoke in Kylo’s mind, details blurred but clear enough to get a reading off: they’ve been shocked by the exploding door. One is panicking, his rifle’s arm strap stuck in the groove between his armor’s chest plate and pauldron. The other already has her rifle up and aimed in Kylo’s direction. 

He senses all of this in the time it takes for his lightsaber to crackle to life in his hand. Swinging into a low arc, he ducks through the door, slicing the Stormtrooper with the raised rifle cleanly in half. 

Her body remains whole for a second, then slowly slides into two pieces that drop separately to the floor.

The other Stormtrooper’s fear batters against Kylo like hail, battling frantically with the rifle strap until he’s shaking too badly to get anything done, drops everything, and turns to run. But Kylo has some questions for him.

He catches the ‘trooper with the Force, throws a fine-threaded web of energy around him and freezes him in place. A heartbeat thuds quick as some tiny animal in the palm of his hand.

A sharp tug of his wrist jerks the ‘trooper sideways to slam into the wall. But the ‘trooper’s fear and panic, his frenzy, go suddenly quiet, and when Kylo lets him go, he slumps to the floor. Unconscious.

Kylo may have been a little rough.

He walks over, prodding the fallen ‘trooper with the toe of his boot, and says, “Wake up. I have questions for you.”

But the Stormtrooper does not wake up, and Kylo has yet to invent some way to interrogate the unconscious with the Force. He sighs, powering down and clipping his lightsaber to his belt. Hux would say he's being unproductive. 

In the quiet that follows Kylo allows his senses to spread over the ship, through corridors and maintenance ducts, right into the bowels of her engines. There is a deep undertone to the thrum of the Force, a sense that would translate to the way something rotting smells, if the Force could be reduced to the inferiority of the other senses. Somewhere on this ship, someone is very scared.

Which, to be honest, it is the  _ Finalizer _ . Resistance hostages and Stormtroopers sent to reconditioning and officers about to face battle: all of these are sources of the same kind of fear he feels now. Hundreds of wounded crowd the docking bays; they too are afraid. He himself has been the cause of similar fear too many times to count.

But this is different. This feels… familiar. 

_ Hux _ .

He starts to run.

Hux’s fear is a fine green thread leading him through the ship, through winding corridors and maze-like halls, past Stormtroopers eating in the mess, up an elevator that screeches along its tracks as Kylo uses the Force to drag it upwards faster. It takes him too long to reach the command bridge anyway; when he arrives, he's out of breath, his long sleeves cloying and hot.

He skids to a halt just outside the main entrance to the bridge; leans one hand next to the maintenance panel blinking red and yellow and peers inside.

Rodinon and Kaplan stand on the raised pathway that splits the bridge. Hux is kneeling between them, hands bound behind his back, hair disheveled and only half-dressed. The fear Kylo had sensed is thick here, like acid coating his tongue, and from this distance he can also feel Hux’s anger, his quick heartbeat, and his surface thoughts, racing to try and find an escape.

Phasma is a heap of shining chrome on the ground to the side; a quick scan reveals Mitaka’s terrified consciousness in the console pit below.

“...a destructive, impulsive child,” Rodinon is saying, the barrel of his blaster pressed against Hux’s forehead - his surface thoughts reveal that they are talking about Kylo, which is honestly a bit hurtful - “Cowering under the Supreme Leader’s authority like an abused dog. I’d rather eat my own hand than take orders from him.”

The Force whispers to Kylo, and as his anger builds the Darkness unfolds inside of him like the blooming petals of a bloody flower. He neither wants nor needs to hear the rest of their conversation.

Time seems to slow as he steps out onto the bridge. His energy swirls around him, blurring the visible world like waves of heat, and Kylo surges through the mirage, focused only on Hux. Kaplan and Rodinon are still talking, but they will soon be silent. They signed their death warrants the moment they laid a hand on Hux.

Kylo senses it long before Rodinon pulls the trigger, lifts his hand and wraps the Force around the blaster, trapping the laser bolt in a bubble of light and violent energy. It reflects white and burning yellow on the sharp curves of Hux’s cheekbone, cutting a stark profile against the black of the Finalizer. With Kylo’s rage fuelling him, holding the laser bolt is as easy as grasping the thin stem of a flower.

The lights on the bridge start to flicker, electric currents wavering and shorting out as the Force clouds over them.

“That's enough,” Kylo says, his voice thick, pushing his energy over Kaplan and Rodinon and clamping down on them like a vice, freezing them in place.

When he realizes his brain is still safely housed inside his skull, Hux opens his eyes and straightens, looking around slowly, confused. Then his eyes land on Kylo, and though his expression does not change (a dark scowl with a hint of derision), Kylo senses his fear and confusion get overwhelmed in a massive rush of relief. 

Kylo walks over slowly, looking around at the rest of the crew members on the bridge, cataloging the face of every officer who stood by and allowed this to happen, who watched as these traitors brought his perfect Hux to his knees. They will all die. 

But first.

He closes his hand into a fist, mimicking the movement with the Force and snuffing out the laser bolt that still dances and sizzles in the barrel of the blaster. Hux is getting to his feet slowly, pushing up with one leg. (Blood drips from a new, purpling cut under his right eye, has trickled and dried a long red streak into his tank where the blaster wound in his shoulder has reopened. He may look like marble and copper and everything cold, but he is so fragile, Kylo thinks, so very breakable.)

From the corner of his eye, Kylo sees a few of the bridge personnel shuffling, edging towards the door. Two make an outright break for it, peeling from the command bridge as though running for their lives. Kylo lets them go. He'll find them. The Finalizer is not that large.

He takes his time, prowling over to Hux and grappling with the binders around his wrists until he eventually just uses the Force to snap them in two. Angry red welts mar the porcelain-fine skin where he'd been struggling with his restraints. (Kylo finds his reserve of anger has room for a little more.) 

He resists the urge to touch Hux, affirm with his own hands that he's alright and in one piece, contending himself instead with glaring at Kaplan and Rodinon. Next to him, Hux draws himself to his full height, imposing despite how slim he looks without the uniform tunic and greatcoat. His contempt for the officers is palpable, the insult to his pride by far a worse grievance than any of his wounds. Kylo almost pities Kaplan and Rodinon. Almost.

“As I said,” Hux says, acerbically, “I don't think your new Supreme Leader would agree to a change in management.”

Kylo nods thoughtfully. “What was it Rodinon was saying again?” 

Hux, catching on, rubs his chin in an exaggerated gesture of confusion. “Something about his hand, I believe? Do be so kind as to remind me, Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Rodinon glares at Hux as if he could kill him with a look. Kylo raises his hand only slightly, applying the barest amount of Force pressure to the man’s throat.

Rodinon barely even starts to choke before he breaks. “I said,” he gasps out in a quick rush, “I’d rather eat my hand than take orders from Kylo Ren.”

“That can be arranged,” Kylo agrees, and he’s just angry enough to see it through. Rodinon’s hand starts to rise under Kylo’s command, shaking. He’s fighting against it, his face turned blood red. But he never stood a chance against Kylo. 

The tension on the bridge is palpable. Everyone’s eyes are rooted to the Lieutenant, to the way he shakes visibly now in Kylo’s grip. Next to Kylo, Hux is glancing at him, but Kylo’s too focused on controlling the minute musculature in Rodinon’s arm to get a read off him. (He doesn’t want to tear the Lieutenant’s hand right off. Not immediately, anyway.)

Tears leak from the corners of Rodinon’s eyes as Kylo makes him press his hand against his own mouth, and with a tiny twitch of Kylo’s wrist, Rodinon’s index finger slips between his lips. 

“Please,” the officer grinds out, teeth scraping over the pad of his finger, “Kylo Ren, please.”

Kylo’s not sure what he’s trying to say, thinks maybe Rodinon isn’t either. He seizes the Lieutenant's jaw, locking it firmly in his grip before slowly closing his teeth down on the finger. He can feel a shadow of Rodinon’s sensations, feel the soft flesh denting under his teeth, a dull grating ache that slowly flowers into pain as he bears down on his skin.

“Enough.”

It’s Hux, his voice muffled and far away. Kylo is focused on the sinewy ligaments in Rodinon’s finger, trying to get his teeth to break the skin. Control at this scale is harder than he’d expected; sweat trails down the side of his face as he shifts his weight for focus.

“Enough,” Hux says again, and when Kylo doesn’t respond he lays his hand on Kylo’s wrist. The contact is enough to allow Hux’s emotions to pierce through the veil of Kylo’s concentration: anger at Kaplan and Rodinon, residual panic from nearly being killed, and something deeper, darker, aimed at Kylo. It’s enough to distract him.

Rodinon collapses into a shivering heap of charcoal grey material on the floor, and the moment passes.

Kylo’s anger still runs hot right beneath the surface, so he gives the traitor one last, dark look and clenches his hands into fists to keep himself from doing anything brash, stalking to the viewport to look out at the stars. They do little to calm him.

Hux sees to it that his ship is running smoothly once more in a matter of minutes, with the kind of grace and precision Kylo could never hope to imitate. Behind him, the bridge erupts into a chaos of activity as those officers loyal to Hux spring into action. The newly-resuscitated Phasma follows in Hux’s wake like a typhoon, and between them they hastily assemble a task team to take Kaplan and Rodinon into custody and start tracking down all the other insubordinates on the Finalizer. 

“Those who do not volunteer for reconditioning,” Phasma directs, holding an ice pack to the back of her head, “can choose the brig or the airlock. This ship is already over-capacitated with all the injured from Starkiller; no need to waste precious life support on traitors.”

With Kylo’s presence on the bridge, the reconditioned Stormtroopers seem suddenly capable of reassessing the worth of their newfound loyalties: there is little interference from them as the docking bays are locked down, all ships and shuttles grounded.

The emotions of Hux’s personnel are a whirlwind of chaos, buffering against Kylo’s walls, and he gets lost in it so deeply that when someone suddenly takes his arm, it startles him enough to nearly lash out with the Force. He stops himself just in time when he recognizes Hux’s fiery, rumpled hair.

He glances around the bridge; it’s nearly empty apart from Mitaka and a handful of other officers whose names Kylo doesn’t know. Hux waits for Kylo’s eyes to wander back to his face before saying, “Come.”

He turns, clearly expecting Kylo to follow. Kylo does.

Hux walks up to his command chair, that great monstrosity skulking at the head of the bridge like the severed, open claw of a leather and steel beast, and nods for Kylo to stand beside him as he sits down, looking for all the world like a king taking the throne.

Kylo stands behind him and a little to the side, confused. 

Then Mitaka says, “We’re live, sir,” and at the same time Kylo notices the Finalizer’s main comm link, activated and flashing a cheerful blue over the broadcast panel. He tilts his head to the ceiling, where the steady red light of a recording camera laughs down at him.

Oh no. No… no.

As if Hux can feel Kylo’s sudden panic, he grabs his sleeve, anchoring him firmly in place when he would have run. 

Kylo does not do cameras.

“This is General Hux of the First Order,” Hux begins, and hammers an extra nail into Kylo’s coffin when he adds, “broadcasting to the flagship Finalizer, Outer Rim fleet operatives, and all First Order territories. Rumours of a splinter faction plotting to overthrow the new leadership of the Order have recently been brought to my attention. I am here today to confirm that those rumours are true.”

Kylo wants to die.

Hux continues, “The First Order will not tolerate dissent. We will not tolerate insubordination. This faction has been borne from doubt, in the admittedly poor leadership skills of the recently departed Snoke, may he rest in peace. But no matter how founded in truth it may be, doubt leads to failure. And failure leads to only one thing - disorder.” 

Hux’s voice is steadily rising, one hand resting in a tight fist on the arm of the chair.

“The First Order is not an organization that promotes disorder. We are iron and steel, and we will not shatter under the fire of dissent!”

He’s starting to turn slightly red in the face, letting go of Kylo to lean forward in his chair. “If you find yourself having doubts in your new leaders, I urge you to lodge a formal complaint. Your grievances will not go ignored.

“There is no more New Republic. We have wiped them from the annals of history as we will soon wipe the Resistance from the face of the galaxy. There is only the First Order, and defectors will be met with the harshest punishment.”

Hux’s voice is cold, cutting, and holds the attention of everyone watching like a vice.

As he continues to drone on, always one to have loved the sound of his own voice a little too much, Kylo allows his senses to wander, fanning out over the bridge and scanning the minds of everyone within his immediate reach. He finds admiration, awe, and, yes, fear - but no doubt. No thoughts of discontent. Everyone here is loyal to Hux.

“... your Supreme Leader, Kylo Ren.”

Kylo snaps back into his own mind, blinking down to find Hux looking at him expectantly. And as the silence stretches on awkwardly he picks up the faintest shadow of Hux’s thoughts: Say something.

Kylo turns to the steady red camera light, trying frantically to recall the slightest fragment of what Hux has been saying. Something. Anything.  

“Yes,” he tries, floundering a bit and wishing he had his mask to hide behind,  “As, uh, General Hux says. Don’t make stupid choices. That will be all.”

To the side, Mitaka presses a sequence of buttons. “Feed cut, sir.”

Hux swivels in the command chair to look at Kylo.

“What?” Kylo snaps, annoyed at having been put on the spot.

Hux looks at him with derision sharp enough to cut. Kylo can almost hear him think:  _ Good thing we don’t have a  _ complete _ idiot for a Supreme Leader.  _

He fights the urge to cross his arms defensively, clenching his fists at his sides instead. If Hux notices his irritation, he ignores it, getting up and pushing past him with a long, wordless look. Kylo feels like Phasma has a handle on things here, so he follows the uncharacteristically shaggy copper head off the bridge and into the bowels of the ship.

He’ll pay a personal visit to the brig and its soon-to-be inhabitants once things have settled down.

Hux is silent in the long elevator ride and stoic as they pace the unending corridors towards the officers’ quarters. Even his emotions are hard to get a read off, which is unusual for him.

They slow to a stop at the very end of the personnel deck, in front of Hux’s private quarters. The doors are stuck wide open, a yellow light phasing slowly just above the entry pad. The Force shows Kylo two hazy, indistinct forms, tampering with the door - a vision of the past. Then Hux steps through them and they dissipate around him like smoke.

Kylo hesitates, then follows; this is the first time he’s been in Hux’s quarters.

Kylo’s imagined what they would look like on occasion: pictured a heavy wooden desk, obviously expensive; a deep leather sofa against the wall. He imagined a small refrigerator, stocked with rare whiskeys and exotic treats from far-off planets; bookshelves with priceless tomes on strategy and Imperial History; walls lined with Hux’s military achievements, medals and badges; certifications in the place of windows.

Instead, the antechamber is… surprisingly normal. On the narrow desk sits a datapad and a pair of reading glasses (Kylo picks these up and turns them around, trying to imagine Hux wearing them). 

The standard wall display has been replaced with a large board currently covered in rough, hand-drawn schematics Kylo can’t make sense of, and the pedestal on which Kylo has installed his grandfather’s mask in his own rooms instead houses a flat, horizontal display, above which tiny holographic markers are hovering, frozen in the midst of some or other military strategy he’s working on. 

Apart from that, there is absolutely nothing to set Hux’s rooms apart from the rest of the Finalizer crew. Regulation size, standard issue furnishings. Even the carpeting is the same dark grey, coarse material Kylo hates walking barefoot on in his own quarters. 

Something prickles at the back of Kylo’s neck, a sense of presence from beyond the dark entrance to Hux’s berth, vague and indistinct. Not the constant, humming static of the Finalizer’s security cameras, always present in the back of his head, but something alive, something curious. He feels its gaze on him, hypervigilant, its intent unclear. Not human, he doesn’t think, or he’d be able to get a reading off it. But something... 

He’s about to investigate when Hux says, “What was that?”. He’s crouched down by the wall to tug the cover off of a panel just inside the door, and has both hands buried inside the jumble of hidden wires like a surgeon. 

Kylo feels like he’s missed something, again. Despite being able to read minds, he finds himself at a loss distressingly often as far as Hux’s thought process is concerned. So he says, “...What?”

“The hand, Kylo. Don’t you think that was a bit excessive?” Hux’s eyes are focused on the cables in front of him, stripping away red and green plastic to reveal the thin copper wires inside. 

Hux has this way of making Kylo question his own motives, of making him feel like a child. He shouldn’t have to explain himself: They hurt Hux. Therefore, they had to pay. But Hux would never be satisfied with that answer, so Kylo rearranges the words in his head until they spell out something more suitable.  

“They needed to be shown who holds the power here,” he answers, clenching his fists again defensively. “They’ll never accept me as Supreme Leader if they don’t fear me.”

Hux reaches up to wipe a fresh trickle of blood from the cut on his cheek and turns to look at Kylo, a tangle of wires wound through the fingers of his right hand. “You made a man eat his own hand,” he says, sounding incredulous. 

“He shot you,” Kylo points out. He doesn’t think he has to tell Hux why this was a problem for him. 

“I had it under control,” Hux answers, turning back to the wall almost dismissively.

Rage boils in Kylo. Ungrateful. “Fine. Next time I’ll let you use the Force to stop a blaster bolt from piercing your skull. What are you doing, anyway?”

“They overrode the entry codes to my quarters, so I have to rewire--”

He’s interrupted by three soft tones over the ship’s intercom system, signalling the start of the routine, shipwide broadcast. There are three during each standard day on board the Finalizer, recorded by Hux himself and cycled on a weekly basis: One at the start of the first shift, to remind personnel of their duty to the First Order and the glory that awaits them all once the abhorrent Republic has been defeated; one marking the mid-cycle meal break, thanking personnel for their hard work and listing the latest crimes of the Resistance - vermin for whom complete eradication would be a kind fate; and this one, at the end of the last shift, reciting the manifest of the First Order and ending with a short inspirational anecdote, often inspired by Hux’s own experiences (which Kylo has personally always found pretentious and unnecessary, though he’d never say it to Hux’s face).

This time, it’s not Hux’s familiar voice and cultured accent that leak from the speakers, but Kaplan’s flat tones: “This is your new General--”

A small twitch of Kylo’s fingers and the speakers fizzle out into static, then silence. Hux turns to give him a pointed look. “Kylo, really.”

Kylo just shrugs. He doesn’t feel like dealing with Hux’s indignity at being replaced any more today. Besides, this will give him the opportunity to record a whole new set of speeches, which for someone who loves talking as much as Hux does, shouldn’t be a problem.

“Anyway,” Hux continues, tenaciously, “You’re the Supreme Leader now. You need to show some decorum.”

Kylo huffs out a sigh. “I’m only the Supreme Leader because you made me. I’m not the one who came up with this bright idea. I never wanted it.”

“That’s not what you said when I had my mouth around your cock,” Hux finishes whatever he’s doing, tapping the cover back into place over the mess of wires with the side of his palm and straightening up. He wipes his hands down the sides of his jodhpurs, turning to Kylo. And standing there, all messy hair and pale shoulders framed by the stark lines of his tank, Kylo is struck again by just how  _ beautiful  _ he is.

Forgetting what he was about to say, Kylo tears his gaze away from him and just mutters, “You’re an asshole.” He glances around the antechamber again to try and spot the source of the feeling of being watched. “I just saved your life. You should be grateful.”

“Really.” Hux puts his hands on his hips, “You also nearly got me killed when we faced Snoke. I think that makes us even.”

“You’re the one who lobbed a bomb at his face,” Kylo snaps, and immediately regrets how childish he sounds. “You’re so…,” he waves a hand indistinctly, “and… I thought I was doing the right thing.”

In the turbulence following Han Solo’s death the Force didn’t speak to Kylo, didn’t show him the way, or perhaps he was too blinded by his own emotions to see it. He’d faltered and wavered and eventually stumbled right into Hux’s bright ambition, like a moth to the flame.

“Were you doing the right thing when you fucked me right before crawling back to Snoke?” Hux snaps back, “He would have had me executed if he’d lived, Kylo. I’d be dead.” 

“But you didn’t die,” Kylo points out, and they are both close to shouting now, “and you didn’t die again, today. Because I saved your life.” 

“You are the most dense and infuriating--”

He can feel Hux building up into a full fledged rant, and Kylo is tired and doesn’t feel like arguing anymore, so he does the only thing he knows will shut him up: takes two steps over, grabs him by the dogtags and yanks him forward for a kiss. 

The reaction is immediate and surprisingly intense: Hux melts in his arms, synapses lighting like a myriad of tiny oxytocin-fueled fires across his mind, and Kylo thinks wistfully of all the arguments he could have won if he'd only thought to try this sooner. He lets his eyes slip shut, losing himself in the presence and the heat of Hux and forgetting just for an instant that he’s actually still pissed at him.

Then Hux shifts, and Kylo can almost physically feel him pushing his desire down as his hands push Kylo away. 

He gives Kylo an exasperated, if fond, look. “Conflict avoidance is no way to solve problems, Kylo. If you’re to be Supreme Leader, you must learn that communication is key to a successful--” 

“Hux,” Kylo grinds out, vexed, “Shut up.”

He grabs a handful of Hux’s tank, pushing him back until his back hits the wall, and does his best to loom over him. Hux’s jaw twitches slightly as the impact jolts his shoulder; otherwise he is still, crossing his arms over his chest and staring at Kylo defiantly. Unafraid. Fuck, he loves that about Hux.

He’s tired of fighting and kissing Hux has started to turn him on, and there are other, more enjoyable (if not more efficient) ways to settle their disputes anyway. The way Hux is looking at him, feral, makes him think he'd agree.

The feeling of someone’s eyes on him prickles down his back again, but he shrugs it off in favour of using the Force to shove Hux’s jodhpurs down. Hux wrestles his arms out from where they are pinned between them, lifting one leg uncomfortably against the restraints of his pants to rest his calf against the side of Kylo’s knee. 

He mouths at the corner between Kylo’s neck and shoulder, burrowing in under his shirt. Kylo hooks an arm under Hux’s thigh, lifting him off the ground and pressing him against the wall. Hux is pliant in his arms - he remembers the first time they fucked, how Hux practically turned into jelly under him. It was startling how soft he became, how much pleasure he got from having his body so easily physically manipulated; and disorientating for Kylo, who was so used to Hux being nothing but stiff and formal and rigid. 

He presses two fingers against Hux’s lips, leaning back slightly to watch as they slip into his mouth. Hux glances up to meet his eyes, and the contact sends a shock of pleasure straight through Kylo, coiling down through his abdomen and straight into his cock. Hux is beautiful and pale and  _ here _ and  _ willing _ , and Kylo still has trouble wrapping his mind around the fact that Hux wants this, wants him.

He can’t wait any longer; pulls his hand away and down behind Hux, kissing him messily, quickly, and finding himself having rather some trouble focusing on both tasks at once. Two fingers later and Hux is not ready, not by a long stretch, but he’s biting at Kylo’s ear, his breath damp against the spot just below it on Kylo’s neck, and when he breathes out, “Just get inside me,” Kylo nearly comes right then and there.

So he reaches down to fumble with his breeches, stepping in between Hux’s thighs as best he can. It takes far too long to undo them and shove them down to his knees, but then he’s grasping the base of his cock, nudging against Hux, supporting him with the hand still hooked under his thigh. Hux grunts, and Kylo catches himself thinking again that someone as uptight as the General has no right sounding so erotic during sex.

He slides against him a few times, then pushes in, and in, until Hux is fully seated in his lap, bent uncomfortably backwards against the wall. Kylo braces the forearm currently not cradling Hux’s ass next to his head, leaning down to nip at the elegant line of Hux’s jaw and--

Movement, in the corner of his eye. Panting, Kylo turns slightly, and freezes. A small, orange cat is perched on Hux’s desk, paws neatly folded underneath it, watching them with interest.

Kylo blinks.

Tufts of white fur stick out of its ears, a black collar clasped neatly around its neck. Orange, stripy fur partly buries the tag, but it looks like a tiny First Order symbol in red. Their eyes meet, and Kylo recognizes the familiar feeling of being watched. He narrows his eyes at the cat.

“Why the hell did you stop?” Hux says breathily, peering at Kylo through the slit of one eye, “Don’t stop, fuck.”

Kylo stares at the cat with a frown, turned fully towards it now. The cat stares back, and definitely looks like it’s planning to murder him and become the next Supreme Leader.

“What,” Kylo manages, “is that.”

Hux, confused, turns his head to follow Kylo’s gaze, frowning at the cat or maybe just  _ because Kylo _ , and says, “Millicent,” as if that explains everything.

Kylo turns slowly to look at Hux. His hair is disheveled, his face slightly blotchy and his eyes pleading. 

Kylo has questions. 

But Hux just says, “It’s fine. She’s fine, just keep going, for fuck’s sake,” and  _ clenches _ around Kylo oh so sweetly and Kylo decides his questions can wait. He resumes pumping into him, but keeps half an eye on the cat, because he has a History with miniaturized predators and they can not be trusted.

Hux makes these small, breathy sounds that are so unlike the cold and militaristic General, but so very much like the man underneath it, and Kylo comes entirely too quickly, again (the first two times they’d fucked, he’d thought it was just because it had been quite some time since he’d last had sex, but now he’s starting to suspect it’s just because it’s sex  _ with Hux _ , and so, by definition, just… better).

He comes into Hux with a long, drawn-out moan, slumping and flattening him against the wall under his body. He can feel wet spurts of heat soaking into his shirt as Hux comes a moment later, senses the blazing network of his synapses light up with pleasure that drowns out his noisy thoughts.

And as the haze of orgasm slowly fades away, all of his wounds from the past few days abruptly catch up to Kylo. His face stings with sweat, dripping from his hair into the burn tearing over his nose, a deep jab of pain in his side with every panting breath, and though he’s holding Hux up with his good arm, the weight of him is starting to take its toll, dragging on the muscles in his neck and tugging at the lightsaber wound splitting open his collarbone.

But Hux is clinging to him as if he can become part of Kylo through the process of osmosis, tight enough that there is not one part of his body not touching Kylo. Kylo can feel his heartbeat thudding just behind the hard metal edges of his dogtags, and it’s starting to feel familiar, how almost desperately he holds on to Kylo as though he were afraid Kylo would leave him.

As if Hux is afraid of anything.

As if Kylo would ever leave him.

So Kylo takes a breath and steels himself against the burn of his muscles, straightening up and transferring Hux’s full weight into his arms, carrying him through to the berth still buried inside him.

(He keeps one eye on “Millicent”, who is still watching them curiously from the desk).

The lights turn up automatically, revealing a room surprisingly austere for belonging to the Order’s esteemed General: a neatly-made berth, black sheets and pillows, three identical pairs of boots lined up, heels to the wall, a small desk with a data console currently displaying only the time in dim red LED numbers.

The only concession Hux has made to his station is the black coat stand in the corner; a leather mannequin torso with undefined edges, cut off just above the neck. From its shoulders Hux’s precious greatcoat spills to the floor, proudly on display for presumably only himself and, apparently, the cat.

With Kylo’s size, Hux’s berth is too narrow for both of them, but after some shuffling (Hux is squirming with the need for a shower, but Kylo’s feeling lazy and comfortable and shifts them around so he is lying half on top of Hux, pinning him down until Hux relents and relaxes), they fit their limbs onto it somehow, Kylo’s head resting somewhere on Hux’s ribs. 

Kylo yawns, a pleasant post-coital haze making him drowsy. He catches onto a thread of Hux’s thoughts and follows it back into his mind, curling up there. It’s one of his favorite places to go: there’s a spot just behind Hux’s burning hatred of him that is very soft and very warm, and until recently Hux himself didn’t even know it was there. Kylo escapes into it, somewhere he’s appreciated, and before long, drifts off to the quiet, rhythmic rise and fall of Hux’s chest.

 

\---

 

It’s far too early in first shift when light floods over Kylo, waking him from a dream in which he was bodiless, drifting through the stars like space debris. Through the blurry haze of one half-opened eye, he can just make out Hux fresh from the shower, hair already slicked back out of his face neatly. The entrance to the refresher is a glaring yellow rectangle of light, illuminating the otherwise dark bedroom.

Kylo shifts onto his back, tucking an arm under his head. Without all his layers of clothing, Hux is unexpectedly lithe, all ribs and hipbones and the raised slope of his spine shifting beneath his skin when he bends. A surprisingly soft stomach (which Kylo spent some time exploring with great pleasure while Hux slept) and delicate wrists; the body of a man who eats little and sleeps less, doesn’t have the time; hides it all beneath that ridiculously huge coat. 

The movement makes Hux glance at him, and as he unwraps the towel from his waist, he says, “I’m launching the attack on the Resistance today.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow at him.  _ Good morning to you too.  _

He sits up, pulling the sheets over his lap, and asks Hux, “Are we ready? Half the crew are dead or injured.”

Pulling those ridiculous jodhpurs over his slim waist, Hux replies, “The Order needs a common objective to rally around, and the Resistance is vulnerable without the New Republic’s fleet to rely on. Now is the opportune time to launch an attack; they practically have one foot in the grave already.” His fingers busy themselves with the clasp of his belt. “What easier target could there be for a Star Destroyer than a few ancient X-wings on a bedraggled refugee planet?”

Kylo doesn’t think it appropriate to remind Hux what the Resistance has been capable of doing with only a few ancient X-wings before. He rubs absently at the lightsaber burn slicing through his face.

On come Hux’s boots, polished to a shine. Bit by bit the pale expanse of his skin disappears under First Order black, and with every inch Hux turns from the soft and warm body that melted into Kylo the night before, into the cold and hard General he loves to hate; his uniform like a shell of armour hiding all his vulnerabilities.

As he pulls a dark tank over his freshly bandaged shoulder, he says, “Their defeat will unite the First Order,”, and Kylo supposes that, as far as strategic objectives goes, it might just be ambitious enough to actually succeed. If they can pull it off.

Hux shrugs on his uniform tunic, zipping it up under his chin and fastening the clasp of the wide belt around his waist. The cut under his eye has healed into a thin pink line neatly splitting a bruise just starting to turn green. The mattress indents to Kylo’s right as he sits down, wrestling with the cufflinks above his wrists. Kylo shifts up, batting his hands away to fasten first the left, then the right for him. To his surprise, Hux lets him.

“Kaplan and Rodinon used my absence after the Starkiller disaster as an excuse to instigate their coup,” Hux continues, watching Kylo’s hands, “but they’ve been planning this for some time. I may have underestimated how fragile loyalty to the Order is these days. We need a common goal, and the Resistance has been weakened by the loss of the Republic’s fleet. They won’t expect an attack so soon, either, so we have the element of surprise.”

“Okay, but we’re weak, too,” Kylo reminds him. “Half your officers are in reconditioning, Hux. You planning on flying this boat by yourself?”

Hux scoffs, giving him a dirty look. “Half? Really, Kylo, I hardly think the number is that high. Kaplan’s faction was effective, but small.”

“I don’t know. I think you’d be surprised,” Kylo says with a small smile. “You tend to rub people the wrong way.”

Hux doesn’t deign this with an answer. He merely levels a Look at Kylo, removing his wrists from his hands and getting up. The greatcoat goes over his shoulders almost reverently, swishing gently in his wake as he leaves the room. 

Kylo hears the hydraulic hiss of the antechamber doors, and then Hux is gone, his unextinguishable ambition driving him inexorably onwards to the next quest for glory.

Kylo is still drowsy, and Hux’s pillows are warm and carry his smell, so he folds his arms around one and languishes on his side, closing his eyes, fully intent on going back to sleep.

Except. Something is watching him again.

He opens an eye slightly to find his field of vision suddenly filled with the murderous face of Supreme Leader Millicent, close enough for her whiskers to tickle Kylo’s cheek. He starts, sitting up too quickly and just catching the Force before it bubbles out of his hand to remove the threat. 

The cat hisses, startled. Her tail puffs out to twice the normal size. Kylo instinctively pulls the sheets up to cover his crotch, frowning. “Look, cat. You may have won Hux over with your… big eyes and fluffy ears. But I know the truth. I won’t be so easily deceived.”

A low growl is his only reply, and he’s almost tempted to growl back out of principle. He makes a face when he realizes he has essentially entered into a staring contest with a cat who, by all evidence, hates him. The feeling is mutual.

Grumbling, he absolutely does not shift right up against the wall awkwardly to get out of bed, giving the small creature a wide berth. No comfort is worth this. 

He’s definitely going to have some questions for Hux later.

There are other things he should be doing now, anyway; a whole brig full of brand new prisoners for him to interrogate. Traitors and liars, his favourite kind. He finds himself especially looking forward to interviewing the crew members who were on the bridge for Hux’s execution - he has a few very special questioning techniques in mind for them.

He’s most certainly not leaving because he’s scared of a cat. Not even cautious. He’s more… tentative of her, because Hux clearly likes her, and he doesn’t want to accidentally hurt her.

Or at least, so he tells himself as he stalks back to his own quarters.

Stupid cat.


	3. Are you there, God? It’s me, Leia

All things considered, Hux is actually having kind of a good day. Aside from waking up half stuck to Kylo with dried come, which was horrid, yet inexplicably endearing at the same time (much like Kylo himself), he's pleasantly sore from being rode into last night, survived attempted murder at the hands of Kaplan and Rodinon, both rats now safely awaiting dishonorable discharge in the brig, and he's back on his now once again smoothly-running warship, at the head of the most feared and respected organization in the Galaxy (if not the most loved, which... he’s honestly okay with).

It's almost enough to make him smile as he tugs on his gloves, fingers slipping home in the warm leather with a sense of profound familiarity and comfort. The lights in the front chamber of his quarters brighten automatically as he steps through, and Millicent hops off his desk, weaving through his legs and rubbing her head against his boot. He reaches down to scratch behind one ear lightly and the cat runs off, always one to love taction, but only if she’s the one to initiate it.

She disappears into the bedroom, where the low lighting illuminates a Kylo-shaped lump under the sheets on Hux’s berth. She makes herself at home on the pillow next to his head, one paw grabbing tiny handfuls of black hair as she starts to knead. The sight fills Hux with a strange and foreboding sense of fondness, which he immediately stamps out with the firm resolve of someone who does not have time for Feelings, and isn’t even really sure what he has qualifies as Feelings anyway.

He turns away before the treacherous warmth in his stomach can unfold any more, grabbing his datapad off the desk and tucking it into the inner pocket of his coat. He’ll concede that having Kylo spend the night in his quarters may have contributed a little bit to making him feel safer there, after having had his private space invaded so rudely the day before. Common sense, he rationalizes: Kylo is very powerful, and would probably not allow anyone to kill Hux. Not that Hux needs protection, really; he can take care of himself. He just wasn’t expecting to have to do so in what he’s come to think of as his own home.    

As he palms the keypad to open the door, he makes a mental note to have his entry codes reprogrammed. His crude hotwiring did a good enough job temporarily bypassing the ship’s main control module, but he’s going to have to install some or other personal biometrics reader to make sure the only person able to enter General Hux’s quarters is General Hux himself.

He steps halfway through the door, then pauses, one hand resting lightly on the frame.

A Stormtrooper stands at attention against the opposite wall of the narrow corridor, gleaming white armour breaking the dark, bluish-grey monotone of the Finalizer’s halls. A red Lieutenant’s pauldron perches on one shoulder, blaster rifle slung over the other, and he has his helmet tucked lightly under one elbow. Skin the colour of dark amber and large, earnest eyes under heavy eyebrows: Hux knows him. And he’s not where he’s supposed to be.

“XN-336,” he acknowledges, more of a question than a statement. It's against regulations for Stormtroopers to be on this deck, reserved only for higher-ranking Order personnel, and Hux didn't end up having a great time the last time some ‘troopers broke this regulation. So his guard goes all the way up, unease making him scowl.

XN-336’s eyes are trained on a spot somewhere above Hux’s left shoulder, very carefully not looking inside his quarters, where the berth and Kylo’s mop of dark hair can just be made out past the antechamber. Hux completes his step, letting the door hiss shut behind him. It occurs to him that he's forgotten to bring his blaster, which is of course  _ exactly _ the kind of thing someone who recently faced attempted murder should be doing. He blames force of habit and the familiarity of being back on the Finalizer - he’s never needed to carry a blaster on his own damn ship.

The fact that he’s relied on XN-336 before as an ally does little to assuage his fears: he finds himself rather lacking in trust as far as Order personnel goes lately.

“Good morning, sir,” XN-336 greets, falling into step next to and slightly behind Hux, whose mind is already calculating all the different ways he can wrestle the helmet from the ‘trooper’s arm and beat him with it.

He replies, cautiously, “And to you. Why are you not at your assigned post?”

“Sir, this  _ is _ my assigned post. I heard what happened on the bridge yesterday.” When Hux glances back over his shoulder, XN-336 meets his eyes. “I’ve taken the liberty of signing up in a guard position over your personal capacity, General.”

Hux narrows his eyes, slowing to a stop to glower at him. “I do not want, nor need a bodyguard.”

“Captain Phasma herself signed my standing orders, sir.”

Hux sighs. Of course she did. And to be honest, he’ll grudgingly admit that he isn’t entirely averse to the idea of having a second pair of hands in case of another attack, especially if those hands come with a blaster rifle and previous record of insubordination in Hux’s favour.

Besides, he reasons, the fact that XN-336 is here means Phasma trusts him, too. Which is enough of an endorsement for Hux.

Their boots click on the polished black floors as they march through the sharp angles and twisted halls of the star destroyer, Hux with his hands folded behind his back and 336 with his blaster subtly held at the ready.

Something occurs to Hux when he catches 336’s reflection passing one of the covered control consoles just outside the training deck.

He turns his head back to ask, “Were you standing outside my quarters all night?”

336 shrugs one shoulder and says, “Part of the job, sir.”

And that’s… creepy. But Hux finds himself feeling somehow slightly comforted by the thought, and despite his better judgement, starts to relax a little in the ‘trooper’s presence.

“So you’re to be my babysitter, then,” he grudgingly accedes.

XN-336 says, “Yes, sir. But I respectfully decline to read you any bedtime stories.”

When Hux stops to level him with a Look, XN-336 only smiles a little, tentatively, as if he’s not sure how far he can push things with the General.

Hux just shakes his head. “Very well, 336. I’ll accept having you in... ‘a guard position over my personal capacity’, was it? But do try not to get in my way.”

He resumes walking, inclining his head at two petty officers saluting him as they pass.

336, trailing behind, says, “I would never, sir,” in a tone of voice that implies he very well might, if he thought it necessary.

A myriad of stars glitter outside the triangular viewports spanning the half-circle of the Finalizer’s command bridge. They’d chosen this particular solar system for the location of the Starkiller Base construction project because of its proximity to a star-forming nebula; when they depleted the resources of this system, there would be a never-ending supply of suns for her to consume. But that was before the Resistance blew everything to shit, leaving only a very conspicuous blank space in the viewport where Hux’s precious weapon used to be.

With renewed anger and a strengthened resolve to wipe those abhorrent Resistance pests from the face of the Galaxy, Hux shakes off the deep melancholy threatening to overwhelm him, straightens his back and steps onto his bridge.

The bridge is significantly less staffed than it had been the previous day, which is, frankly, depressing. Lieutenant Mitaka, who doesn’t usually work this shift and looks tired, thumps his fist against his chest in salute as Hux enters. Chief Petty Officer Unamo is waiting by the door to hand him a datapad, displaying a casualty report also listing the yet unrepaired damages to his ship. He flicks through these with his thumb, wandering to the head of the bridge and taking the command chair.

One of the tiny floor lights spanning the length of the bridge flickers, immediately drawing Hux’s eye, and he scowls at it as 336 falls into parade rest slightly to one side of him. The Resistance pilot and that insubordinate Stormtrooper did a number on his ship when they escaped. And with the emergency medical support set up for the refugees from Starkiller, resources have been too taxed to get to all the repairs straight away. He adds the little flickering light to his ever-growing mental list of things he is going to make the Resistance pay for. Dearly.

A rookie officer whose name Hux doesn't know appears from somewhere behind him, holding out a cup of caf. Hux stares at it, then up at the officer, definitely not about to trust anything about this innocuous-seeming gesture, and wishing he had Kylo’s mind reading powers: he can't quite discount the possibility that the caf might be poisoned, which, alright. He might be a little paranoid. But still.

When he doesn’t immediately take the cup, the officer swallows visibly, reaching his arm out as far as it will go and balancing the caf precariously on the armrest of the command chair, before turning and all but running out the room. Behind Hux, XN-336 snorts softly.

Hux ignores him, turning back to the bridge and taking in the empty chairs and unmanned wall consoles; all positions previously staffed by people he thought he could trust, now left glaringly vacant and somewhat accusatory. You should have been better, they seem to say, you should have been more inspiring of loyalty. If they loved you, they wouldn’t have turned against you.

Hux frowns, weaving his fingers together and resting his elbows on his knees. He barely registers the presence of Unamo, tucking an errant strand of hair behind her ear as she steps up to deliver a status report about a number of the Order’s financial sponsors who have pulled their support in the wake of the Starkiller fiasco, halting progress of the construction of the star destroyers they'd been funding.

The First Order has been fractured, broken in pieces by the opportunistic greed of individualists, and Hux failed to prevent it, failed to even foresee it. But no matter. It ends today. It ends with the elimination of the Resistance, and the final rise of the Order to the governing power in the galaxy. And when he’s taken over he will rule with a strict policy of zero tolerance: there are more ways than one to inspire loyalty in people.

Hux interrupts Unamo mid-sentence. “Are the plasma cannons charged?”

She hesitates, trailing off and lowering the datapad in her hand, caught off guard by Hux’s entirely unrelated question. “...Sir?”

“The cannons, Unamo. I ordered them charged before arriving back on the Finalizer.”

Hux watches her expectantly, leaning back and resting his hands on his thighs. She glances around as if for help, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. It’s suddenly very quiet on the bridge. “Sir. We had to route power from the secondary engines to the ventrals and shield areas damaged in the Resistance pilot’s escape, and a lot of resources are being used by the emergency med bays, so the cannons won’t hold enough charge for a volley--”

“Unamo,” Hux snaps, and she flinches slightly, “If I so chose. Could I, right now at this point in time, blast a hole the size of a continent into a planet of my choosing using my plasma cannons, yes or no?”

“...Yes, sir,” Unamo relents, “Plasma cannons fully charged and ready to, uh, blast a continent-sized hole in the target of your choosing, General Hux.”

“Excellent,” Hux says, bringing his hands together before reaching over to taking Unamo’s datapad from her. “Lieutenant Mitaka. Do tell me there was at least one person on this bridge with enough common sense to keep searching the Ileenium system for the location of the Resistance base?”

For his part, Mitaka seems slightly less tentative than Unamo. Hux would say he seems almost smug, stealing a glance toward her that anyone less trained in the arts of audaciousness than Hux might have missed.

“We have them, sir,” he replies, sounding wholly pleased with himself, even going so far as to smile a little bit, “I've taken the liberty of inputting the coordinates into the flight systems already.”

“Very good, Lieutenant.” Hux sits forward, gesturing with one hand. “Launch at hyperspeed. And have Phasma ready the remaining troops for battle.”

“We’re attacking the Resistance, then, sir?” Unamo asks, fiddling with the hem of her shirt as she suddenly finds her hands empty of her precious datapad.

Hux, scrolling through the items on it absently, shakes his head. “Oh, no. We’re not going to attack them, Chief Petty Officer. ‘Attacking’ implies giving them a chance to fight back. No. We’re going to annihilate those vermin once and for all.”

A chorus of “Sir”s echoes around the bridge as his personnel spring into action, a chain reaction of orders being passed over the comm links to prepare the troops for war. The constant low thrum of the ion engines rises into a roar as they engage hyperspeed, gravity lurching uncomfortably as the stars streak into silver and blue trails outside the viewport.

Yes, Hux will admit that, despite everything, he is actually having a good day. This is where he belongs, in the cold, climate-controlled air and sterile lighting and dark, angular lines of the Finalizer; where he was always meant to be. And once they've taken care of the Resistance, nothing will stand between him and the throne of the Galaxy, and he will rule it as it was always meant to be ruled: a united and unbreakable empire free from corruption and greed, shaped from the cinders the Finalizer will leave in her wake.

Not even the annoying financial report still open on Unamo’s datapad in his lap can bring him down, though he’s going to have to deal with that whole clusterfuck sooner or later. Sponsors withdrawing their support from the Order will cause a serious delay in the construction of their fleet. But right now, it's of little consequence: the Finalizer is the Order’s flagship, the original and currently most impressive symbol of their power. She’s the only ship that will ever truly belong to the Order, unsubsidized and free from the grubby little hands of their benefactors. Hux commands her, and she is his ship, like Starkiller was his weapon, and she will be just as effective at dealing irreparable damage to the Resistance - hopefully wiping them out for good this time.

He’s in such a good mood that he almost considers taking a sip of the now-cold caf at his elbow, or at least having Unamo taste-test it before drinking it himself. Flipping through the items on the datapad, he adds his digital signature to a request for additional resources for an ore mining operation on a small Outer Rim planet (ore is a marketable resource; they can cut off a few spare men from their now-strained operations on nearby planets to assist if it will mean an increase in profit - they need the money). He’s just about to signal Unamo over to him when a junior officer clambers out of the console pit on the left, jogging over to Hux and saluting smartly.

“What is it, Officer…” Hux peers at his badge, “...Riddell?”

“General. Incoming communications from outside First Order standard frequencies.”

Outside Order frequencies. No one outside Order frequencies should be able to breach the Finalizer’s highly-encrypted signals, much less decode them enough to be able to send a message. Then again, he supposes he shouldn’t trust Order encryption too much, seeing as a bunch of second-rate officer scum was able to override the access codes to his personal quarters.

He gets up, following Riddell to the console pit and crouching beside it with his elbows resting on his knees as the officer drops back down in front of his station. His console is a beehive of multicolored lights, crawling up the wall of the pit like the happily-winking threads of a cyber spiderweb. A hundred switches and buttons, each carefully labeled and color-coded, spill over the work surface and onto the body of the podium, and in the center of it all sit three transpariscreens, floating in the center of the chaos. Riddell swivels the middle screen around and up to face Hux, and sure enough, there it is: an unencrypted comms notification, blinking confused red in the middle of a set of safely-encrypted green messages.

Huh.

“Any idea whom it’s from?” he asks the officer, reaching down to tap his forefinger on the notification. It unfolds into a multi-panel display, blank and uninformative.

“No, sir,” the officer confirms, “but the signal appears to be emanating from the coordinates we are currently heading toward.”

Hux turns to look at the junior officer. “The Resistance base?”

“So it would seem.”

He looks at Riddell a moment longer, trying to assess if he’s being serious. The young officer is stony-faced, but his hands bundle the hem of his tunic into fists at his sides nervously under Hux’s scrutiny.

Hux rests back on his heels, considering. He’s long suspected the Resistance might have spies aboard his ship, feeding information on the First Order’s machinations to their friends, but he never thought they’d be this fast: he literally just gave the order to launch a few minutes ago.

Straightening with a scowl, he clasps his hands behind his back and starts to pace the bridge. “I’d have preferred to overwhelm them with a surprise attack… but I suppose our victory will be all the sweeter if we crush them despite their best efforts, forewarned or no.”

He makes his way back the command chair, sitting down and nodding at Riddell. “Open the link, center display. Let’s see what those curs want.”

Riddell presses a sequence of buttons at his station. Above them, a panel slides open with a hydraulic hiss, allowing a large display screen to unfold from the grey ceiling. It spans the viewport, blocking the center-most windows from the view of Hux’s seat.

“General Hux,” a female voice echoes over the bridge. The screen flickers to life accompanied by a ripple of surprised gasps from Hux’s crew: It’s Resistance General Leia Organa herself, hair neatly wrapped around her head in a greying braid and the collar of a purple shirt hugging her jaw. She’s framed shoulders-up on the screen, allowing very few background details that could give away her location.

She looks as if she’s seen too many sleepless nights, the kind of worn out one gets from having to deal with too much sadness and distress and confusion in too short a time. Hux can relate.

“General Organa,” Hux says cautiously, tilting his chin up at the screen, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I would not be contacting you if I had...  _ any _ other choice.” The pause in her sentence is revealing; something tells Hux this is the last of a myriad of options she’s explored and discarded. “We must meet, General Hux.”

Hux can’t stop the surprised huff of laughter that escapes his throat. “Meet? General Organa, if it’s your intention to surrender, I respectfully decline.”

“Surrender?” Organa frowns slightly at the camera, “No, General Hux. That is not my intention at all.”

Hux scrutinizes her slightly-pixelated features, rubbing at the knuckles of his left hand with his right thumb. Organa stares into the camera earnestly, mouth pinched into a thin line. And something about the way she’s looking at him, specifically, almost searchingly, gives him pause. He has to be careful, here: there is a chance Organa has not, in fact, been notified of the Finalizer’s launch by her spies. If so, they still have the element of surprise, and he can’t afford to let anything slip that will make her suspicious. In the game of politics, the fine art of misdirection is as valuable as currency, and infinitely more effectual.

But he’s been quiet too long. Organa’s eyes narrow slightly, and as she draws breath to say something, Hux quickly interrupts her. “Why do you want to meet, Organa? If not to beg for your pathetic Resistance lives.”

“I’d rather die than beg you for anything, General, please believe me. But this is something bigger than us all. Bigger than the conflict between the First Order and the Resistance, unimaginably more vast than the struggle between the Empire and the Republic, or… or even the Sith and Jedi themselves.”

A hush has fallen over the bridge, the slightly digitally distorted echo of Organa’s voice the only sound. Officers and Stormtroopers alike have stopped what they’re doing to watch this exchange. Hux finds himself on the edge of his seat, posture tense, and forces himself to relax slightly.

“This is a matter of life and death,” Organa continues with a grave expression, and stares right at Hux as she concludes: “General Hux, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but… I am calling for a truce.”

More surprised murmurs from the bridge personnel. Hux gestures for the junior officer in the pit to cut the sound, leaning back in his chair to let this sink in. He considers Organa’s gigantic face, distorted by the fine pixel lines of the holo-display.

It’s a trap. It has to be. Organa pre-empted their retaliatory attack and has planned this… whatever it is.

The Finalizer is the First Order’s most powerful weapon at present, and the Resistance knows she survived. Organa has a reputation for being a fearless leader with a mind for strategy: she could very well have predicted Hux’s logical demands for retribution for the loss of Starkiller (unlike Snoke, in whose plans logic apparently never played a very big part). It’s not difficult to imagine her suspecting an imminent attack and coming up with a counter-strategy, even if she may not have realized the attack would come so soon.

Hux seeths. He hates being outplayed. He’s also convinced now that this is some kind of setup, that Organa is leading them into an ambush. There is no other reason he can think of for them to meet. But he’ll be damned if he falls for it.

“Sir?” the junior officer prompts tentatively, his finger hovering over the sound button. Organa is regarding them quietly, the same grave expression on her face.

“This is a trap,” Hux says decisively. “We will not meet them. Unmute the comm and--”

He’s interrupted by possibly the very last person in the entire Galaxy he wants to see right now.

“Wait,” says Kylo Ren, stalking onto the bridge with his usual impeccable timing. Wonderful.

Hux narrows his eyes, trying to somehow…  _ Push _ out with his mind and repel Kylo away from the bridge. The last thing this already-volatile situation needs is the addition of the Galaxy’s least emotionally stable human being, especially considering whom they are talking to at the present time.

Predictably, as Hux hasn't yet magically gained any Force abilities via the act of fucking a Force user (he's going to look into whether this is possible later, just in case), it doesn't work, and he shifts slightly uncomfortably as he realizes he’s been staring at Kylo for longer than can be considered decent in his attempts at telekenesis. He opts for frowning somewhere at Kylo’s shoulder instead.

Kylo comes to a standstill next to Hux’s chair, completely ignoring the murderous glare Hux is leveling at him. He’s dressed his signature, scraggly black ensemble, or the most recent iteration of it anyway, as the last was torn to shreds on Starkiller Base. He has the cowl drawn up far over his head, draping over a brand new helmet he’s procured from somewhere. It’s almost identical in design to the old one, but where the embellishments framing his eyes were silver on the old mask, they are gunmetal black on this version, almost invisible until he shifts his head slightly and the light catches them.

“I sense that there is more to this,” Kylo says softly, staring up at his mother’s face on the display.

“ _ Do _ you.” Hux drawls, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. He can’t read Kylo’s expression behind the mask, but on the screen, Organa looks stricken, one hand clasping briefly over her mouth before she’s able to school her features back into the quietly sober expression from before; her own version of a mask, emotionless and cold.

“Organa seems sincere,” Kylo directs at Hux, his voice distorted enough through the vocoder that Hux almost misses the tiny waver over Organa’s name.

“She’s roughly eight thousand lightyears away, Ren,” Hux gestures sharply with one hand, annoyed, “How can you tell?”

“I just can.”

When there is no further explanation Hux gets up from the chair, turning to face Kylo and clenching his fists in frustration. “You won't let us blow up the planet with Organa on it,” he guesses, “is that it? Scared that killing her will hurt you worse than killing Solo?” He scoffs. “Pathetic.”

Kylo’s mask turns towards Hux. From the way his head tilts down slightly, Hux can tell he’s frowning. “We’re going,” he monotones, “That’s final.”

“Excuse me?”

“We’re going,” Kylo repeats, slowly, as if he thinks it will make Hux understand better, “Give the order.”

“Under no circumstances,” he hisses at Kylo, stepping closer, “This is clearly some kind of trap.”

To which Kylo actually has the audacity to reply, “I am your Supreme Leader. You have to follow my orders.”

Did he just…  _ Pull rank _ on him? Hux can feel a vein starting to throb painfully in his temple. “Like hell I do!”

They are both hissing angrily, right up in each other’s faces. The now-familiar smell of Kylo’s robes envelopes Hux, sharp and slightly acidic, like burning metal. Hux isn't sure where the smell comes from, as these are presumably clean, and he now has the additional knowledge that Kylo himself actually smells completely different underneath them.

From the corner of his eye Hux can just make out one or two of the bridge officers shuffling awkwardly, looking decidedly uncomfortable. On the screen, Organa is thankfully passive. (He supposes not being able to hear their exchange helps with the lack of judgement).

Kylo closes in enough for his robes to brush against Hux’s ankles, looming over him. The dark mask, unbroken now by the silver lines that framed his eyes before, would be intimidating if Hux were in any kind of mood except furious.

“You’re the one who set me up in this position,” Kylo’s voice crackles over the vocoder, “How would it look if you disobeyed me right from the start? The First Order will never believe in our solidarity. You don’t want another Kaplan on your hands, do you?”

Hux briefly goes into his own fantasy world where he grabs Ren’s stupid lightsaber off his waist, powers it up and slices his oversized head right off his shoulders. He’d get arrested by his subordinate officers, maybe, executed (again), or perhaps just sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. It could be quite relaxing. He could use the R&R, maybe take up a hobby…

But the crew are watching, Organa is watching, and goddamn if Kylo isn't right about having to put up a united front for them. And after all, Hux’s day just wouldn’t be complete without some part of it being fucked up by Kylo Ren.

Finally, he just hisses, “Fine”, in Ren’s face and turns back to the junior officer whose finger still hovers over the sound controls, gesturing for him to unmute the comm. “But if this is an ambush and we die,” he flings over his shoulder at Kylo, “I am following you into whatever fucking Force-based afterlife you believe you’ll end up in with the express purpose of irritating you into oblivion.”

“General Hux,” Organa says from the direction of the screen, drawing his attention back to her, “Have you come to a decision?”

Hux takes a moment to collect himself, clasping his hands behind his back and schooling his expression before looking up to meet her eyes. “We agree to this temporary truce of yours, General Organa. Furthermore, we,” - he pauses to sneak a frown in Kylo’s direction - “agree to meet.”

“Thank you, General,” Organa says, relief coloring her voice, “You’ve made the right choice. As a sign of trust, I propose a hostage exchange. We have two rather high ranking officers of the First Order in our custody.”

Hux sneers. The last thing he needs is more potential traitors on his ship. “Keep them. We don’t have any Resistance hostages to trade with you, anyway. Our prisoners don’t tend to outlive their usefulness to us.”

For the barest second, horror brims in Organa’s eyes, threatening to spill over. There may have been people she knew among the hostages, friends whose unlikely survival she couldn't help but hope for on her darkest nights, sleepless with worry; now confirmed dead.

There is no room for hope in war. She looks aside, briefly, visibly gathering herself and pushing her emotions down before turning back to Hux. For some reason, this makes Hux grudgingly like her a little. This woman, he thinks, has a core of steel. Too bad so little of it passed on to her offspring.

“Very well,” she continues, sounding tired now. “I’ll send you the coordinates of a location where we can discuss what needs to be discussed in privacy and peace.”

It doesn’t sit well with Hux, meeting at a location of the Resistance’s choosing, but before he can say anything, Kylo takes two steps toward the display, helmet tilted up towards Organa, and replies with a soft, “Yes.”

Hux grates his teeth, walking up to stand next to him. The irony of their current positions - a mirror image of when they stood side by side staring up at Snoke - is not lost on Hux.

Organa says, “We would appreciate it if you came alone, General Hux. Only yourself and… trusted allies.” She pointedly does not look at Kylo. “We’re not looking for a fight.”

Hux considers this, getting more and more apprehensive. All kinds of alarms are going off in his head, screaming that this is wrong, that he is clearly walking into a trap. That they are all going to die. He glances at Kylo, who, of course, only inclines his head imperiously as if personally okay-ing this endeavour.

So Hux consents, against his better judgement. “Alright. I’ll bring a few trusted men... and your precious son. You can have a happy little family reunion. With what’s left of it, anyway.”

Organa glares at him, the corners of her mouth turning down slightly and her eyes pinching up under a frown, and for a moment she looks so much like Kylo that Hux is taken aback.

Kylo, for his part, has fallen silent, mask tilted down towards the floor.

“Thank you, General Hux,” Organa says coldly, her expression making it clear that she's had enough of masking her distaste of the whole situation, “I look forward to meeting you.”

Despite the polite words, her tone says that she would rather be eaten alive by a Rathtar.

The image of the Resistance General collapses into a thin line of light, then disappears, the display folding in on itself and flattening away into its hidden panel in the ceiling. Hux turns and slowly walks back to the command chair, sinking down in it and gesturing in Mitaka’s general direction. “Bring us out of hyperspeed.”

Mitaka initiates the sequence, gravity shifting as the ship slows, then drops out of lightspeed, the silver smears of stars shrinking back into a million tiny pinpricks of light outside the viewport. He shifts slightly, biting his lip, then asks Hux, “Sir. Are we really doing this?”

“Against my better judgement,” Hux answers, glaring at Kylo, “Yes. It appears we are.”

Unamo speaks up from her console against the wall. “What about mobilizing the troops, sir?”

Hux considers, tapping one gloved finger on his jaw as he swivels his chair back and forth slightly, then answers, “Carry on as planned. If this is a trap, and I want to make it clear that I still very much believe it is, I want the Finalizer on standby to be the cavalry.”

“Sir.”

Hux has too much nervous energy to remain seated, so he gets up, sidestepping around Kylo and heading for the entrance to the bridge. XN-336 falls into step behind him, blaster rifle cradled lightly in the crook of his elbow. To Hux’s annoyance, Kylo trails them both, the sound of his uneven footsteps grating on Hux’s nerves. Hux considers surreptitiously tripping 336, causing the rifle to “accidentally” go off and shoot Kylo in the face.

“Inform me the moment the Resistance sends the coordinates for the meeting,” he instructs Mitaka as they pass his console, “and have a half squadron sent to docking bay 4.” He said he would bring a few soldiers. He didn't say how many. “Phasma’s most trusted only.”

He doesn't wait for Mitaka’s salute, stalking through the entrance and down the hall to the elevator. When Kylo walks up next to him, he turns to snap, “Don't you have some prisoners to interrogate?”

Kylo doesn't answer, and an awkward silence hangs over them until the elevator doors close on the three of them. Then Kylo turns towards Hux and says, “I don’t believe this is a trap.”

“Yes, thank you, Supreme Leader Ren,” Hux can’t help snapping, “for your extremely valuable input, which just put the brakes on an entire military operation and its very large, very expensive-to-power warship.”

Kylo makes this kind of irritated huff behind his mask, clenching his hands at his sides. “There’s something more to this, Hux,” he says eventually, “I can feel it.”

Hux turns to him, bearing forward, and Kylo actually backs away a step before catching himself and standing his ground. XN-336 flattens his back against the elevator wall, inching away from Kylo as much as possible in the small space.

“I’m only going to say this once.” Hux says, enunciating each word clearly and jabbing his forefinger into Kylo’s shoulder, “If your personal feelings towards Organa are in any way clouding your judgement in this matter, I will personally see to it that you are removed from your position as Supreme Leader and declared an unfit authority. We can’t afford to have any conflict of interest in our command right now.”

“I’m not…” Kylo grates out, “That’s not what this is.”

Hux is entirely unconvinced, and levels Kylo with a hopefully eloquent look.

The doors ping and slide open as they reach their floor, and as an afterthought, Hux adds, “And we're taking your command shuttle to the planet. If this is an ambush, I'm not letting them shoot First Order property full of holes.”

As they step out the doors, Kylo catches his sleeve, pulling him to a standstill just outside the elevator. Hux glares at his hand, then up at his masked face.

Kylo asks, softly, “Don't you trust me?”

“Not as far as I can throw you,” Hux answers without hesitation, “and you're extremely heavy.”

Kylo comes to stand in front of him, taking both his hands in his. His power clouds around Hux, but it's different from the stinging, prickling sense of presence that emanated from him on Snoke’s planet, when he was weak and hurting and so incredibly filled with rage. This is a warm, enveloping sensation, not unlike being hugged, and infinitely more intimate. Hux, despite still being very tempted to knee him in the balls, relents a bit, feeling some of the tenseness leak from his shoulders. He even goes so far as to let Kylo keep his hands, curling his thumbs lightly around his palms.

He's starting to suspect he might be developing a weakness for Kylo, which should make him angry, fill him with the indignity of letting a rival have the advantage over him. In reality, he only feels resigned, tired of fighting it and tempted to give in to this feeling of fondness for Kylo lurking somewhere just behind his ribs.

They’re close enough for his breath to mist on the mouthpiece of Kylo’s mask, to feel the heat radiating from Kylo seep right into his bones.

To the side, XN-336 shuffles uncomfortably.

“You do trust me,” Kylo says, softly, “You wouldn’t let me fuck you if you didn’t. Also, I can read your mind.”

Hux is about to make a snide remark when 336 clears his throat loudly behind a hand. Kylo lets go of Hux, stepping away from him just as two Stormtroopers and a senior officer round the corner, saluting them as they step past into the elevator. Hux, disgruntled, doesn't respond.

Kylo waits for the doors to slide shut after the officers before finishing, “I know you have misgivings. But I think we can trust Organa, Hux. And besides… even if it is an ambush. I’ll be there. They won’t stand a chance.”

“Unless they bring that scavenger girl with them,” Hux points out, “Because judging by the ugly scar you're hiding under that helmet you didn't fare too well against her last time.”

The reaction is instantaneous, like flipping a switch. Kylo hunches in on himself, posture slumping and fists clenching at his sides. And if Hux weren't so absolutely sure Kylo wouldn't harm him, he might be afraid. Instead, he just crosses his arms, daring him to disagree with his eyes.

Kylo doesn't. Without a word, he turns and stalks off, footsteps thudding loudly down the hall.

Hux just shakes his head, turning and heading towards his own quarters to prepare for the journey. He starts making a mental list of everything to take: it consists mostly of blasters, combat knives and other devices intended for grievous bodily harm. If Organa means to attack them, he'll be damned if she catches him unprepared.

XN-336, trailing behind, pipes up with, “Wasn't that a little harsh, sir? Throwing his failure back in his face like that.”

Hux turns to give him a Look. In lieu of telling him to mind his own goddamn business, he just says, “That’s out of line, 336.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Hux sighs, turning back in the direction of his quarters. Upon reflection, he’ll admit that 336 may not have been  _ entirely _ wrong. But Kylo’s infuriating habit of ruining Hux’s plans never fails to get under his skin, and no matter how hard Hux tries to remain professional and to act according to his rank and station around the man, he’s somehow never quite able to restrain himself entirely.

And he was having  _ such _ a good day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is now a standalone chapter that takes place between this chapter and the next, in which Kylo takes Millicent hostage to force Hux to apologize to him. [If you like badly-written sex featuring about 1000 bad cat puns, read it here!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8723266)
> 
> \----
> 
> Special thanks to my IRL friend L, for helping with one particularly frustrating line, and for her continual encouragement of Hux’s strict Zero Chill policy.


	4. A Jedi, a droid and a fascist dictator walk into a bar

To his dismay, Kylo realizes he recognizes this place. The shuttle’s engines whine as he tugs on the steering too quickly, surprise overriding his usual finesse as a pilot and bringing them to a stuttering halt.  They sit just outside the orbit of a tiny red moon, clinging for dear life to the gravitational field of a dusty, grey planet, massively pockmarked and lifeless. Both are just entering the apex of their lazy swing around the only star in this region, too small to call itself a sun by any definition of the word.

Kylo presses his head back into the headrest of the pilot’s seat, suppressing a sigh. Of course Leia would bring them here, to this moon: a smuggler’s hideout, colonized by the lowlifes, thieves, gangsters and freeloaders of otherwise deplorable character Han Solo used to refer to as “friends”. A throwaway place, nothing more than a blip on the radars of the Republic and Old Empire. And for Kylo, the sight of it has a much more personal association, like a bad taste on the back of his tongue: the scene of his very first kill...

Han had forgotten his eleventh birthday. Kylo can’t remember where they went that day, but he remembers stopping here on their way back, on this tiny little red moon, and he’d had to wait in the Falcon as Han went off to do his business, some or other shady deal in the only tavern in the moon’s only little town. 

He waited and waited, playing round after round of Dejarik against the console until he thought he would go mad. It was cold in the Falcon, and so quiet, and he was starting to get hungry when there was a loud bang against the hull. A few seconds of quiet broken only by the hammering of his own startled heart were almost enough to convince him he was imagining things. And then there was another bang, and another, and he realized someone was breaking down the entry hatch.

He remembers clambering into the air duct to hide as some of his father’s “friends” raided the ship, waving blasters around and ransacking storage crates and console compartments and anything else they could lay their hands on that looked valuable. Ben had waited and waited, bundled up, legs cramping in the small space, and the Force had whispered to him, and when he’d had enough of waiting the small metal grate exploded from the duct, and when Han Solo got back to the Falcon there were five bodies on the floor and a lot of blood. So much blood. 

He’d never seen Han as angry as he was that night. Ben never understood why. (Kylo does.)

They never told Leia about what happened, but Kylo thinks she must have known, somehow. She was scared enough of him as it was, at the time, scared of the echoes of Snoke she could see in his eyes but not yet understand. They went home, and Ben went to his room, and when he woke up the next morning he was being carted off to study with Luke, and it would be the last time he ever saw his parents. Until many years later. Until...

No. He does not have any fond memories of this place. 

He takes a breath to steel himself, then eases forward on the steering, guiding his command shuttle down through the misty amber of the moon’s atmosphere, ears popping as the pressure in the cabin changes. Next to him, Hux regards the approaching surface with what looks like disdain, though it’s hard to tell as this is mostly just his usual expression. His surface thoughts are a mess of apprehension and anticipation, a familiar, comforting buzz Kylo settles into gratefully. It distracts him from his own nervous agitation.

Small brown dots sprawl beneath them, breaking the red of the moon’s surface like a rash, and as they slowly sink to the ground the dots grow into squares, tiny haphazard buildings roughly outlining a hesitant patchwork of dirt roads. They land on the edge of the town, red dust billowing in gusts from the engines’ downward thrusters. Kylo takes a bit longer than necessary to start powering down the shuttle.

As the dust settles outside the viewport, it reveals a desert-like expanse of emptiness, stretching right up to the gently-curving horizon. A pale sky yawns overhead, cloudless and immense, interrupted only by the faded sickle of the moon’s distant planet, a slice of pockmarked grey-white reflecting just enough light to illuminate the surface.    

From the left-most corner of the viewport peeks the rickety awning of a squat, Veshok-wood building, right at the very edge of the town’s main road, which is short enough to see the end of and generally uninspiring. The rounded hull of a ship Kylo would recognize anywhere juts out from behind this building: the Millennium Falcon. The last time he saw it, it had brought Han Solo to his death. And now it brings him the only remaining member of his family. He can’t shake the ominous feeling suddenly lining the pit of his stomach, heavy and sickly, and he stares at the sad, grey hull of the Falcon so long that it startles him when Hux’s hand lands on his shoulder, using him as a lever to hoist himself out of the co-pilot’s seat.

“Might as well get this over with, then,” he says, disappearing into the hull. If only it were that easy. Kylo looks back at the Falcon, hesitating for a final second before powering down the shuttle and getting up to follow. Hux’s Stormtrooper lieutenant has already sequenced the door open when Kylo ducks through the low entryway into the bow of the shuttle, standing at Hux’s side to watch the landing ramp slide to the ground.

Four Stormtroopers flank them, standing at attention, and when the ramp makes landfall they jog out the shuttle first, taking up guard positions on either side of the ship. Hux turns to look at Kylo, nodding his head towards the exit, and as they take the ramp together, footsteps clanging metallically and XN-336 trailing slightly behind, Kylo tries not to be envious of how confident Hux manages to look.

Beneath their feet the earth is hard and dry, fractured into the ugly, water-starved cracks of a desert. It’s a heavy, foreboding kind of quiet, broken only by the shuffling plastisteel armour of the Stormtroopers, filing into position, and a hot, dry wind, peppered with swept-up sand and tiny, dead leaves and concrete grain from the decaying stone walls of the old town. 

Hux coughs, lifting a hand to shield his eyes from it. Kylo’s mask and the ‘troopers’ helmets filter the worst of it, leaving only a dry, slightly acrid taste to the recycled air, but Hux’s face is bare and vulnerable, and he looks uncomfortable, so Kylo unwraps the heavy-woven scarf from around his shoulders, holding it out to Hux wordlessly. There’s one long moment in which he can almost physically see Hux’s pride warring with his need, but eventually need wins, and he reaches out to snatch it from Kylo, winding it around his neck and face.

The town looks abandoned; buildings dark, boarded up and quietly swaying in the wind, dry grass and weed swept across the dusty road, unbroken by footprints or the patterning tracks of transports. 

The building the Falcon peeks out from behind is squat, square, and the kind of blackened brown that wood only gets from being badly burned or very, very old. Splintering pillars support a rickety, covered veranda, from the cracks in the jagged tiles of which spurt straggly clumps of dry grass, and spiderwebs crawl up the base of the wall, trembling in the wind. 

Its windows, such as there are, have been boarded up from the inside. A faded keypad clings to the wood next to the main door, several of its numbers rubbed off from overuse. Near the far wall hovers a broken down speeder, more rust than steel, now. The holoprojector fixed to the building’s sign board flickers statically, distorting the slowly-rotating name sign hovering just over the roof. Kylo doesn’t understand the native tongue of this moon, but the Force helpfully supplies him with a translation which, while a seemingly apt name for this particular establishment, isn’t something he can repeat in decent company. 

In front of the building stand the Resistance, such as it is: FN-2187 frowns at Kylo, one hand resting on the strap of the old Stormtrooper blaster rifle slung over his shoulder. He wears a faded leather jacket and a pallid complexion, dark circles hugging his eyes. Poe Dameron stands beside him, arms crossed in a pale green and military-looking uniform, the butt of a rifle jutting over his shoulder. Out of all of them, he looks the most obviously angry, posture tense and eyes focused solely, burningly, on Kylo. That infernal droid wobbles out from behind his legs, round and orange and entirely too innocent-looking for the amount of trouble it’s caused Kylo. It beeps softly up at the scavenger girl, hovering close by them protectively. Kylo can’t explain why, but she looks more… solid than the last time he saw her, as if she’s gained some kind of intangible consistency that was lacking before. She leans on her staff, squinting slightly at them against the wind.

And at the front of the group stands Leia Organa, hands pressed against her chest. The first impression Kylo gets of her is that she’s small. She’s never exactly been a tall person - Kylo inherited that from Han - but her pale clothes make her blend in with the hazy refracted light, fade out, and the sadness enveloping her like a shroud does the rest.

Kylo takes a deep breath through his nose, swallows, then looks up at her face.

The world drops out from underneath him and he is suddenly falling, falling, spinning out of control, a deep blackness opening up beneath him and swallowing him whole. His past comes rushing in to fill the void, vivid oilpaint greens and blues and echoing sounds of laughter.

And then he blinks, and the ground is once again solid and red under his feet. It takes him a while to remember how to breathe. Leia has gotten older but no less beautiful, and for a very long, very strange moment it feels like no time has passed since he last saw her at all. 

Somewhere in the background, he hears Hux softly order the Stormtroopers to check the perimeter. His voice sounds warped and muffled, as if underwater. From his peripheral vision, Kylo sees the ‘troopers break off at a jog, splitting into twos and disappearing behind the building.

But he only has eyes for Leia. She takes a hesitant step towards him, one hand slightly outstretched.

‘Might as well get this over with’, Hux had said. Again: if only it were that easy. But Kylo steels himself and walks up to her slowly, stopping just out of reach. He thinks he might throw up.

Leia looks up at him searchingly, then says, “Take off that mask.”

For a moment, he considers not doing it. Letting Han Solo see his face before the end was a mistake; the mask is anonymity and anonymity is safety. But Leia is looking at him with those sad, sad eyes of hers and he’s never really been able to disobey her anyway, not as Ben, and not even after that. So he reaches up to depress the clasps hidden just above the neck joint of the helmet with his thumbs, feeling a rush of hot air swirl against his face as he pulls it up off his head and tucks it under his arm. He doesn’t meet Leia’s eyes.

She looks at him for a long, quiet second, in which the world seems to fall away and leave only them, alone in a void. He senses what she’s about to do, but doesn’t move away, doesn’t think he could even if he wanted to.

The slap stings his cheek, in some ways worse even than the terrible lightsaber burn slicing his face in half.

And then Leia’s arms are around him, gripping tight, her head resting just on top of his sternum. He’s suddenly acutely aware of just how big he is; he completely dwarfs Leia, awkwardly, not returning the hug though she is apparently trying to squeeze the life out of him. And at the same time he’s suddenly eleven years old again, so frail and needy, and everything wrong in the world seems like it would be okay if she would just never let go, if he could just hide in her arms forever...

But she does let him go, steps back, and Kylo has to blink the tears from his eyes as the world comes rushing back in, red and dry and cruel.

There's no coming back from some things. 

Leia dabs at the corner of one eye with the palm of her hand, composing herself and looking past Kylo. “Forgive me, General Hux. Thank you for coming. It fills me with hope to see the new leadership of the First Order isn’t beyond reason.”

“Indeed,” Hux says from right behind Kylo’s shoulder, and Kylo blinks, turning to look at him. He hadn’t felt him approach. He stands maybe half a metre away, arms crossed, eyes narrowed into derisive slits of sharp green (or maybe he’s just squinting against the wind).

“Although,” Hux continues, voice slightly muffled by Kylo’s scarf,  “I would be remiss in not pointing out that your chosen location for this little rendezvous doesn’t exactly lend credence to your proposal for a truce. This town looks abandoned, Organa. The perfect place for an ambush.”

Leia sighs. “It’s not abandoned, General, just quiet. And this is not an ambush. Again, I must…”

Kylo swallows, tuning them out and turning his attention to the other Resistance members to get his mind off of Leia. Sidestepping his mother, who is still trying to reassure a stoic-looking Hux, he shifts his helmet to the other arm, blinking as the wind peppers his face with sand. FN-2187 straightens a bit defensively as he closes in, the pilot’s hand going to the blaster at his waist. The girl remains motionless, calm, and as Kylo tries to get a reading off her he realises that he can’t: her mind is tightly and strongly shielded, allowing none of her surface thoughts or emotions to escape. That’s new.

He stops in front of the ex-Stormtrooper. The fact that he is both conscious and upright is a significant improvement over the last time Kylo saw him. “FN-2187. So you survived.” He adds, thoughtfully, “Guess even Stormtroopers get lucky sometimes.”

There’s a flash of movement, the pilot’s blaster appearing as if by magic in his hand, and in one fluid gesture almost too fast to track, he’s stepped right up to Kylo, pressing the barrel into his neck. He’s close enough for Kylo to smell his cologne, to feel his breath on his cheek.

“Say that again,” says Poe Dameron, pushing the blaster into the soft muscle under Kylo’s chin, “Go on.”

Kylo has to tilt his chin up slightly under the pressure, already gathering the Force in anticipation of catching the laser bolt (or possibly just snapping Dameron’s trigger finger), when FN-2187 is suddenly there between them, prying them apart and holding Dameron away from Kylo with one arm. “Take it easy,” he tells the pilot, “We’re not here to fight.”

Kylo clenches his fist, taking a deep breath and willing the bubbling cloud of his power back down.

The ex-Stormtrooper is looking at him, still holding the pilot back. “And it’s Finn, now. Not FN-2187.” His eyes travel over Kylo’s face, and he adds, “You can remember that every time you look at that little souvenir Rey gave you.”

The scar. Kylo fights the urge to reach up and hide it with his palm.

“Arguing isn’t going to help anyone,” Leia says from behind them and Kylo turns to find her standing next to Hux, the top of her head reaching roughly up to his shoulder, “We need to trust each other.”

“I still think this is a bad idea,” the pilot - Poe, Kylo corrects himself (if they’re going to temporarily work together, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Hux’s says inside his head, he should at least attempt to be civil) - mutters from the side. The little droid beeps its agreement, wiggling slightly as it does.

And then Rey finally speaks up, still leaning on her staff, her eyes stolidly fixed on Kylo. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Poe. But you know why we’re here.”

Kylo’s mind doesn’t have to be trained on Finn and Poe to sense the sudden flash of darkness that shadows their thoughts like a cloud at Rey’s words. He turns his head to look at them, scanning their surface thoughts: senses movement in the dark, something colossal and crawling, a hundred writhing limbs, the faint and dying echo of a sound too immense to comprehend, droning and consuming--

And then it’s gone. Kylo blinks. Whatever that was, it’s nothing good. He’s about to chase the image, delve down past their surface thoughts and into the realm of memory and drag it back up for inspection, but then Hux uncrosses his arms from where he’d been watching them all like some spectacle and says, “Shall we go inside?”, dragging Kylo’s attention to him, and continues, “I hardly think it’s a good idea to discuss this ‘life threatening situation’ out here in the open.”

Leia inclines her head, gesturing towards the building, where Hux’s bodyguard Stormtrooper is waiting next to the door.

As the others start towards the dilapidated wood structure, Kylo takes the helmet from under his elbow and fits it back over his head. He’s not hiding. The sandy wind is stinging his eyes. That’s all.

At least, that’s what he tells himself. 

As they step into the shade and onto the cracked veranda tiles, XN-336 gestures at a spot near the door with his rifle and says, “Leave your weapons here, please.” 

“What?” asks Poe, indignantly, both eyebrows raised in disbelief, “No way I’m leaving my blaster out here with all of these--”

“He’s right,” Leia interrupts, “We’re here to talk. No one should be armed.”

For a moment, Poe looks like he might disobey, giving Leia a pleading look. But Leia’s eyes are like steel, and Poe finally accedes, grumbling as he lifts the strap of his rifle over his head, throwing the gun to the ground. His smaller handblaster joins it a moment later, before he steps through the door into the building. BB-8 trundles after him, pausing to beep indignantly at XN-336 before rolling in after Poe. Kylo doesn’t speak that particular dialect of droid, but he senses it was something vaguely threatening and probably a little rude.

Finn adds his rifle to the growing pile, then slips what looks like a fingerless plastisteel glove off his right hand. Electricity sparks and sizzles through the conductors welded to the back of it, fizzling out as it hits the ground. A stun gauntlet. First Order issue. So the Stormtrooper is a thief as well as a traitor - Kylo supposes he shouldn’t be surprised. Finn gives Rey one last glance over his shoulder, then goes inside.

Hux unholsters the blaster from his left hip, placing it neatly to the side of the other weapons before digging under his greatcoat to take another, smaller blaster from the small of his back. Kylo blinks as he also slips a small knife from a hidden compartment inside the left sleeve of his tunic, careful not to let it cut his glove as he catches it by the hilt, adding it to the pile. Kylo makes a mental note to be careful of that one in the future. Hux pushes the scarf off his head to let it drape around his shoulder, leaving his hair artfully messed, and steps inside as well.

Leia follows him, her only weapon a small, rectangular sonic stunner, the black metal worn to silver around the edges from old age. On the side of the handpiece sits a small metal badge in the shape of a beaked and taloned bird, once gold, but now scuffed down into a faded bronze. Kylo doesn't look at it too closely. The stunner belonged to Han. 

As the darkness beyond the door swallows Leia, Rey steps up next, leaning her staff carefully next to the door. She unclips a lightsaber from her belt - it’s not Luke’s; Kylo doesn't recognize it - laying it down carefully beside Hux’s blasters. A long, curved knife joins it from a holster hanging behind her back. A sonic stunner, like Leia’s but newer, appears from a pocket, a throwing knife from her boot. Kylo meets XN-336’s eyes for a moment. Another knife slips from somewhere in the vicinity of Rey’s cleavage, and a handblaster joins the pile from inside the folds of her tan tunic.

When she appears to be done, Kylo says, “I’m glad to see you didn’t bring the Resistance’s  _ entire _ arsenal of hand weaponry.”

Rey makes this kind of scrunched-up face, looking like he caught her in an act of mischief. Grumbling, she reaches up behind her neck and pulls a long shock baton from under her clothes, adding it to the pile. “Now I’m done.”

Kylo stares. 

Rey says, “What? I knew who we came here to see today.” She gestures at the now significantly larger pile of weapons. “Now you.”

Kylo just shakes his head, stepping up and detaching the lightsaber hilt from his belt to toss it to the ground. It skitters over the bumpy tiles and clumps of grass, coming to a rest against Hux’s blasters. 

As he steps up to enter the building, Rey reaches out to grab his wrist, her hand like a vice. Kylo stares at the hand, then looks up at her to find her eyes boring into him, filled with anger.

“I’m warning you,” she says, her voice soft, dangerous, “Try anything and I’ll finish what we started on Starkiller Base.”

Kylo narrows his eyes at her, wrenching his wrist out of her grasp. “I was weak,” he says, turning to step right into her personal space and using his significant height advantage to loom over her, “Injured. I’m not injured anymore.”

Rey doesn’t back down. She just tilts her head up to look at him coldly, and says, “We’ll see.” 

Kylo has to fight the urge to rub at his wrist when she releases her grip on it to go inside, and he waits for her back to disappear into the dark rectangle of the door completely before exhaling a bit shakily. In the darkest, longest nights of his recovery, when his face burned and he was so sure his right eye would be blind forever, he could admit to himself that he was afraid of this tiny girl. He felt the exact moment she came into her powers on Starkiller, settled into them with all the violence of a phoenix reassembling itself from the ashes, and of all the visions he’s ever had of the future, none could have prepared him for the hope and rage and Light radiating from her eyes as she took everything from him, from Hux. 

He pauses beside XN-336, who is busy gathering all their weapons in his arms for safe storage. Kylo senses he doesn’t trust the ominous quiet of the town either, and would feel safer without enough arsenal for a small army just lying around outside, ripe for stealing.

“Wait at the shuttle,” Kylo tells him softly, “Be ready to leave if we have to.”

“But sir,” the ‘trooper protests, nearly dropping one of the blaster rifles as it shifts in his grip, “The General--”

“Will be fine,” Kylo interrupts. “He doesn’t need you in there. He has me.”

XN-336 hesitates a moment, then inclines his head sharply, in lieu of a salute. “Yes, sir.”

Kylo watches him jog back to the shuttle, arms filled with weapons, then steps into the cool darkness of the building.

It takes his eyes a moment to adjust. As the glare clears and details slowly start solidifying out of the bright afterimage behind his lids, it reveals a short corridor leading to a narrow, wooden staircase, twisting up around a corner and out of sight. To the right are two doors of stained and chipping wood. One has two strips of faded black-and-yellow tape stuck to the frame in what used to be a cross. One strip has ripped near the top and dangles, sad and tattered. To Kylo’s left is a wide, double-door entrance, through which he can hear Hux’s soft voice.   

He steps through the doors and into a large, square, windowless room. A single lightbulb, uncovered, hangs overhead, casting an almost perfect circle of light in the center of the room and leaving the far corners plunged in a deep darkness. The walls immediately next to the door are of the same old, blackened wood as the outside, the floor mostly covered in tiles and partly in exposed, dark red grout. 

The circular spotlight reveals a long, rectangular table taking up most of the space in the room. It seems out of place in this building, in this town; too new, too technological. With its inlaid, lightly glowing holo controls for projecting maps or data or messages or holovids, the contrast between the table and dilapidated room it’s housed in is almost jarring.

Around the table are arrayed ten padded and high-backed hoverchairs, gently undulating in the air as they await their occupants. Rey is just dropping into the soft, black leather of the chair next to Finn’s as Kylo enters the room. On her other side sits Poe, his little droid hovering by his legs. Leia sits opposite them, hands folded on the surface of the table. Hux has, of course, seated himself at the head of the table with the air of someone who not only belongs there, but whose idea all of this was from the start. He grips the edge of the table, thumbs resting on top. Kylo skirts around the chairs closest to him, giving the droid a wide berth and coming to stand behind Hux and crossing his arms. He has too much nervous energy to sit.

Leia clears her throat, folding her hands together. “Let’s get started. The reason I’ve asked you to meet us today is because we have received some very disturbing news. Some…” she frowns slightly, “...thing, some life form has been detected on the very edges of the galaxy. It’s larger than any other life form we’ve encountered before.”

Kylo tilts his head slightly, glad for the mask that hides how disconcerted he still is by seeing her. “What’s worrying about that?”

“It’s not just that they’re huge,” Rey answers in Leia’s stead. “We’ve sensed that they… eat the Force.”

Kylo blinks, arms dropping to his sides. In front of him, Hux rolls his eyes, pushing back from the table to get up out of his chair. Kylo puts a hand on his shoulder, stilling him. He meets Hux’s eyes as he turns back to look at him, urging him back down in his seat gently with his hand. Hux frowns at him, but goes.

Kylo looks back up at Rey. “What do you mean, they ‘eat’ the Force?”

“They consume it,” she says, making a kind of circular gesture with both hands. “Convert it into energy. It’s what keeps them alive, keeps them mobile. They… suck the Force out of the fabric of the universe. When they leave, nothing is left. They move past stars and leave black holes. Planets turned into barren rocks.”

“Wait,” Hux interrupts; Rey frowns. “As I understand it,” he continues, “The Force is a kind of energy field that certain… gifted individuals can tap into.” Sarcasm drips thickly off his voice. “You’re saying these things eat that energy?”

“It connects all life,” Rey agrees, nodding. “It’s inside and all around us. The living, breathing pulse of existence.”

“If it’s inside and all around us,” Finn diverts, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees, “howcome not everyone is able to use it?”

Leia answers, “There are many things about the Force we do not yet understand.”

At the same time, Kylo says, “Midichlorians.”

There’s a brief silence in which everyone turns to look at him. He drops his gaze down to the ground, vowing to keep quiet for the rest of the meeting.

After a pause, Leia turns back to the table, resting her elbows on it and looking at Hux. “The important thing to focus on now is that these… creatures can somehow consume it. We don’t know where they came from or why they are here, but they are coming, whether we want them to or not. And they are a threat to the whole galaxy. To the very Force itself.”

Rey nods, adding, “This is larger than all of us. We need to work together to stop them.”

Hux leans back in his chair, resting his elbows on the armrests and steepling his fingers. He’s quiet for a long time, the members of the Resistance watching him expectantly. Kylo knows what’s coming - he can sense Hux’s contempt radiating off him like heat when he says: “You must be more desperate than I imagined. Using monsters in the night to try and frighten us into surrender.”

Kylo isn’t sure whether he agrees with Hux or Leia; needs some time to meditate on it and see for himself whether he can sense these Force-eating creatures they are talking about. Leia and Rey seem sincere, but there’s a difference between being told life as you know it is about to end, and seeing it for yourself. He’s about to say so when a new voice speaks up from the corner of the room, beyond the circle of light; a voice Kylo hasn’t heard in fifteen years.

“These are no monsters in the night.”

If seeing Leia felt like tumbling into a deep, dark abyss, seeing Luke Skywalker step into the light is like being immersed in a shower of ice. The cold shock rises like bile in Kylo’s throat, trapping his breath and pressing down on his lungs like a vice.

Luke emerges from the deepest shadows in the corner of the room like a spectre, arms crossed with his hands buried in his sleeves. His hood is pulled back to reveal a face hardened by time and sadness, and eyes so cold Kylo hardly recognizes them. He says, “They are very real, and they will destroy us all. Where they go, life ceases to exist.”

Kylo only notices he’s been backing away from him when his back hits the wall. He flattens his hands against the wood, trying to stop them from shaking, trying to ground himself.

Luke bares down on him, the shadows seeming to shift in the beige folds of his clothes, dancing and alive, drawn about him in his wake like a second cloak. Everyone at the table turns in their seats to watch him. His voice is soft and hoarse as he comes to a standstill right in front of Kylo, eyes boring into his behind the mask. “I first sensed them at the First Jedi Temple. And ever since, I’ve felt connected to them. I can sense them drawing closer, and I feel nothing but emptiness in their wake.”

It’s quiet enough to hear a pin drop in the room, but for Kylo’s thundering heartbeat. Everyone is silent, watching Luke with rapt attention.

Then Hux shifts, tilting one palm upwards. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

Everyone turns to look at him, even Luke. In the suddenly broken tension, Kylo feels like a heavy, gripping weight has been lifted off his throat, and he takes a deep, grateful gulp of air, stepping away from the wall as inconspicuously as possible.

“That’s Luke Skywalker,” Rey says, exasperated, in the tone of voice one would use to explain something to a child.

Hux tilts his head back with closed eyes and a softly muttered, “I should have bloody known.”

Ignoring him, Leia says, “We’ve started referring to these creatures as ‘Deimos’, after the old god of fear and terror who waged war on those who worshipped him. Death was his only legacy.”

Hux, ever pragmatic, flattens one hand against the table. “Now see here, I don’t know who it is you think you’re talking to, but I don’t believe in fairytales,” - he nods his head back at Kylo - “and neither does he.”

Kylo, still scrambling to get over the shock of seeing Luke, inclines his head at his uncle with a frown, hidden behind the mask. “Especially not coming from you.”

Luke is a coward. Snoke taught him that. He can’t be trusted, and if he’s the source of this imagined threat of Leia’s and Rey’s, Kylo’s now convinced that it isn’t real. Hux was right, this is a trap.

Luke, sensing his thoughts, makes a frustrated growl, half throwing his hands in the air before abandoning the gesture and stalking up to Kylo. Before Kylo can backpedal away from him Luke’s cybernetic hand lands in a heavy claw on Kylo’s head, gripping tight enough for Kylo to feel the pressure even through the helmet.

It is nothing compared to the sudden weight of the images that assault his mind. The flash of darkness he’d sensed from Finn and Poe before expands and surrounds him, open and void and terribly, terribly vast. It’s as if the darkness has a weight, the sheer  _ lack  _ of anything bearing down on him from all sides.

In the deep reaches are soft scratches, whispers from below, and he can’t trace the direction of the sound because there is no air, there is no anything, the sound exists only inside his head and he is terrifyingly, achingly alone with it in the void. In his frantic need for escape he claws at the darkness, lashing out with his hands and feet and the Force, and when he opens his mouth to scream the darkness bleeds in like ink, filling his lungs.

There is the sudden and disconcerting feeling of his entire body being turned inside out, and then quiet. Calm nothingness. The darkness shifts and blurs into shapes, into stars, the slowly-spiraling crawl of the universe, and he realizes he can breathe again. See again.

And what he sees is  _ them _ .

His mind struggles to comprehend them. Behemoths, immense and undefinable, one thing and many things at once, a seemingly infinite mass of constantly-writhing and heaving black skin. Trying to tell where one ends and the other begins makes his mind recoil sharply, a subtle kind of madness lurking right behind the attempt.  Lightyears across, the size of towering nebulae and blacker than the void between stars, they seem to suck all the light around them right into their skin. Flexible masses of undulating muscle like a hundred massive tentacles stretch out before them, straining outward towards the stars, greedily. Folds of quivering membrane tighten over dark skin wrinkled with thousands of tiny ridges, and as they heave forwards and sag backwards with colossal, wave-like motion, space warps around them, distorting what little light survives their passing into wavering, shimmering pulses making it impossible to look directly at them.  

They move with inexorable, single-minded purpose, only ever forward, because they leave nothing to turn back to. And all around them hangs a monstrous and terrible silence, as if the hum of the very stars themselves has been sucked in.

With all the power of the Force at his command, Kylo’s tiny mind can’t begin to comprehend what they are or what they want, but one thing is very clear to him: They are hungry.

The Force appears to Kylo as a bright blue web of light, connecting a million, pulsating azure pinpricks; the life force of every living thing in the galaxy stretching endlessly before these creatures, whispering and soft. Where the web touches the creatures it suddenly contracts, sharply twisting and narrowing into a large and slowly revolving spiral, tapering to a fading pinprick inside colossal maws stretched wide around impossibly many teeth, concealed at the center of their writhing tentacles. Behind them stretches the emptiness Kylo drifts in; a sea of nonexistence.

Kylo stumbles back from Luke, ripping the mask off his head and throwing it to the ground, gasping for air. He stares at Luke in horror, pressing his back flush against the wall, barely able to hear a concerned Hux calling his name in alarm.

It’s real. It’s all true. He was wrong.

His legs give way, and as he feels himself sinking down to the ground, he hears Leia say, “What’s left of the Resistance army is too small to face the Deimos alone, and the Republic fleet has been wiped out.” She gives Hux a long, pointed look, then leans back in her chair with a sigh. “General Hux, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but we need the First Order. You’re the only chance we have.”

There is a very long silence. Kylo is still reeling, barely able to process Leia’s words, but her concern echoes in his head like a slowly-tolling bell, deep and insistent. Luke is quiet, rubbing his cybernetic hand absently as he watches Kylo with an unreadable expression.

Hux inclines his head, pushing back from the table to get up. “Very well, General Organa.” He walks over to Kylo, giving Luke a dark look as he thrusts out a hand to help Kylo to his feet, “We will consider it. But I will not immediately make a decision.”

Kylo climbs to his feet with Hux’s help, grabbing his discarded helmet in the other hand and steadying himself on Hux’s forearm. If Hux notices how tight his grip is, he doesn’t let on.

Leia stands as well, a relieved expression on her face. “Thank you, General.”

Kylo turns to follow Hux outside, eager to put the stuffy air of the conference room behind him but mostly just wanting to escape the remnants of the vision still clinging to Luke in the form of the constantly-shifting shadows in his robes.

Leia stops him with a soft, “Ben…”

He pauses, hesitating only a second before tilting his head enough over his shoulder to tell her, “I have nothing to say to you.”

Finn joins her and Rey also stands, glaring at Hux for some reason as if he were personally responsible for the way Kylo is. Hux only shrugs with a flippant, “He grows on you.”

Finn vehemently shakes his head.

Kylo ignores all of them, trailing Hux out of the door. Behind him, he hears Finn say, “This is a bad idea.”

“Terrible,” Rey agrees. In the background, BB-8 makes a reproachful-sounding trill that Kylo takes as an insult to his person.

He ignores it, nearly running into Hux, who has stopped just outside the door. An old, decrepit droid is waiting for them there, a bad welding job over one eye module and a missing panel exposing the frayed wiring inside its left arm. It makes a series of flat beeps accompanied by a whirring sound from somewhere deep inside its chest before eventually managing to stutter, “F-follow C0-6P3. C0-6P3 show ro-- rooms.”

Hux glances at Kylo. He must see the way Kylo looks (pale, scared to death and badly in need of a quiet place to sit down away from the prying eyes of the Resistance), because he doesn’t protest, turning back to the droid and gesturing for it to lead the way.

It clomps down the corridor a bit unsteadily, one red-plated foot slightly bigger than its rusted, copper counterpart, and leads them up to the second floor, around the dark corner. The wooden stairs creak under Kylo’s heavy footfalls where he trails Hux, who has his hands folded tightly in front of him in lieu of touching the filthy bannister.

It would appear the Resistance has prepared for an overnight stay: the droid shows Kylo into a small room behind the first door on the second floor landing. A bed with dubious-looking sheets leans against the side wall. Against the opposite wall sits a heavy wooden table with nothing on it except a bottle of unmarked, suspicious-looking amber liquid and a square glass dangling from its neck. A narrow door leads to what turns out to be an old shower. The windows here have been boarded up too, letting in irregular shafts of light in which hundreds of dust motes dance in the air of Kylo’s passing.

“Kyyy- Kylo Ren,” the droid’s voice modulator skips over the name, “Stay here.” It comes out sounding like a command. Kylo doesn’t like the droid, so he kicks the door shut behind it with his boot when it turns to show Hux to the next room.

It’s too dark inside for Kylo, flashes of the emptiness left in the wake of the Deimos still clinging to his memory, so he tugs at the boards covering the window until one of them comes loose, flooding the room in tones of gold. Outside, the sun is just setting, painting the town sepia. It’s quiet, still dead-looking, but somewhere, a lonely cricket has taken up song, and as Kylo leans forward, forehead pressed against the upper board still covering the window, a few tiny, floating lights start drifting over the road. Fireflies. Hundreds of them, and more appearing every moment he watches, until the little flickering lights fill the road in his immediate field of vision, illuminating the cracked red earth and skew wooden supports of the town’s old buildings.

He’s trying very hard not to think of Leia, of Luke, and definitely not the Deimos, still very much shaken, when there is a knock on his door. He senses that it’s Hux, whom of course doesn’t wait for an invitation before just coming inside like he owns the place.

Kylo doesn’t turn from the window. There is a soft creak of hinges as Hux closes the door, the floorboards groaning under his steps as he comes to stand next to him, looking outside at the red town and the fireflies. Kylo glances at him. He’s lost the scarf and greatcoat, and his black First Order uniform is covered in a light sheen of red dust, as are Kylo’s robes.

They stand for a while in companionable silence before Hux says, “You look scared.”

Kylo can’t even pretend to deny it. He is. “I saw them, Hux,” he says softly, trailing the path of a particularly bright firefly across the window with his eyes, “You’d be scared too.”

Hux turns his head to look at him. When Kylo turns to meet his eyes, Hux projects at him, ‘ _ Show me’ _ .

Kylo lets his eyes flicker between Hux’s, unsure. Hux is a sceptic at heart, the kind of person who would doubt the heat of fire until the moment they get burned. But he’s also strong of character and brilliantly intelligent, and if there’s even a small chance Kylo can convince him of this threat, of the urgency of the need to defeat these things, then he has to try.

So he takes a breath, closing the gap between them and resting his forehead against Hux’s. One of Hux’s hands comes up to rest on Kylo’s waist. Hux won’t be able to see it as clearly as it was shown to Kylo, but he tries his best to reconstruct the terrible images of Luke’s vision and pushes them into Hux’s mind, clouding it with all the dread and hopelessness he felt. He can feel it the moment Hux sees them, feel his heartbeat speed up, hear him swallow softly, the sounds echoing in their dark, shared mindspace.

Hux pulls away from him, opening his eyes, and the world shimmers back into place around them as the link breaks. He says, “I see,” and turns back to the window with a frown. The only outward sign that he’s bothered by any of this at all is the small tremble in his hand as he raises it to rest against the wall next to him.

“I think we need to do this, Hux,” Kylo tells him.

“Work with the Resistance?” Hux sounds sceptical, turning and leaning back against the boarded window to frown at the room. “Do you even hear what you’re saying?”

“I don’t think we have a choice. This is too big for us to fight on our own.”

“The Resistance army is pitiful,” Hux argues, “Useless without the Republic’s fleet to support them, and I saw to the end of that fleet personally.”

“It’s not their army we need.” Kylo leans his shoulder against the wall next to the window, keeping one eye on the fireflies outside. “The true battle will take place in the realm of the Force, and these people, Rey, Luke, me, we’re the strongest Force users the galaxy has ever known.”

Hux gives him a look, crossing his arms. “Good thing your ego hasn’t run away from you.” Then he sighs, closing his eyes and letting his head thud back against the wooden board. “Just think about this for a minute, Kylo. These… things, these monsters. They  _ eat _ the Force. How are you going to use the Force to stop them?”

Kylo pauses, then shrugs, directing his words in the direction of the window. “Haven’t thought about that yet.”

“And even supposing there is a way,” Hux continues, tilting his head to the side to look at Kylo, “How the hell am I supposed to convince the First Order to work with the Resistance?”

“You’re a good public speaker,” Kylo brushes it off, “If anyone can do it…”

“What happened to ‘you tend to rub people the wrong way’?” Hux shoots back, then sighs. “This is going to end badly.”

Kylo frowns at him, reaching over to put a gloved palm on Hux’s cheek. He tries to sound convincing when he says, “But we have to try.”

Hux makes this kind of annoyed, scrunched up face at him, ducking away from him to go to the table, lifting the squat little glass off the neck of the bottle and pouring himself a drink. He tries to change the subject. “Your mom seems--”

Kylo cuts him off. “Don’t.”

Hux relents, turning to half-sit, half-lean back on the table with the glass in one hand. He regards Kylo quietly before asking, “Are you sure you’ll be able to work with them? With Skywalker? Considering your primary life goal up until a few days ago was to wipe him from the face of the galaxy.”

Kylo frowns, having tried his best to avoid dwelling on that particular subject. “This is bigger than my past. If we don’t cooperate with them, we all die.” After that… well.

Hux raises an eyebrow at him. “So we cooperate. Then what? Go back to the way things were? Make peace and start building a better world together?” He sounds absolutely sarcastic. “Or maybe we all sacrifice ourselves to these ludicrous beasts and plunge the entire galaxy into disorder--”

Kylo can feel him getting worked up, so he pushes off the wall, taking a few quick steps up to him with the intention of shutting him up with a kiss. Hux, however, seems to have learned from past mistakes, and dodges, squirming out from under Kylo and starting to pace the room.

Kylo clenches his hands into fists at his sides with a frown, turning to follow him with his eyes. “The galaxy existed long before the notion of politics,” he points out, “I’m sure it’ll go on just fine without us.”

Hux pauses to gesture at himself with the hand holding the glass. “I happen to be very fond of being alive, though, thank you very much.”

Kylo anticipates Hux’s next step and slips in front of him to intercept it. He puts his hands on his shoulders, marching him backwards until his calves hit the bed. Hux sits down a bit hard, holding the glass up carefully to avoid spilling and flinging an annoyed “Kylo!” at him.

Kylo kneels down between his legs, on his knees, rubbing his hands up and down Hux’s thighs. Hux looks annoyed still, but his surface thoughts radiate concern, heartbeat still elevated from sharing Kylo’s Force vision, and some deeper, underlying emotion rushing just beneath the surface, green and trembling. Kylo picks at it with the Force until it opens up for him, blooming into a tiny nucleus of fear in the exact centre of Hux’s stomach.

Kylo says, “Told you you'd be scared.”

“I am not,” Hux grinds out, annoyed, “And stay out of my head.”

“I’m not…” Kylo falters, “It’s not…” How can he explain something as complex as the innate, wordless understanding of the minds of those around him based on projection and emotion and  _ being _ , to someone who can’t use the Force? Explaining color to the blind would be easier.

So he just says, “I’m not in your head. It’s just surface thoughts. It’s not important.”

But Hux is curious now, and Kylo can sense he’s in need of a distraction, and maybe trying to explain this to him will help distract Kylo, too.

His mouth twitches slightly to the side as he considers his phrasing. “People think in... levels. Surface thoughts, those are the ones right at the top. Those slow thoughts, the ones you can actually hear inside your head when you think.” His explanation, of course, doesn’t do it justice at all, and he cringes at how dumbed down it sounds. Forging on, he stares at the stitching crossing the waist of Hux’s uniform tunic: “There are other levels, deeper levels. Right down by the, the neurons and synapses, thoughts like little bolts of electricity, too fast to catch on to consciously. They’re the split-second judgements, the thousand little decisions you make unconsciously before a coherent thought ever even occurs to you. Instincts, emotions, your basest needs, your drive. Then there’s memory, which is… old thoughts, deep down, beneath all the other… stuff…”

He trails off, looking up at Hux’s face to see if he’s still following. For a split second he catches Hux’s expression, unguarded, almost fond, before he hides it behind the glass to take a drink.

Kylo shakes it off as his imagination, continuing: “So, to get information from people… it’s like sticking my hand in through a bunch of live wires, digging down. The ones on top are bright and clear, like a neon sign projecting into the night. Easy to read. Impossible not to, sometimes. To get further down I have to shove them aside, clench my fist around those live wires to stop the electricity, the thoughts, from running through.” He feels his expression darkening. “It’s not pleasant for either party. Trust me, you’d know if I was reading your mind.”

Kylo risks another glance up at Hux’s face, and finds him staring at him. He blinks, then looks away, muttering, “What?”

“That’s the most I’ve ever heard you talk at once,” Hux says. Kylo makes a face at him.

Hux drains his glass with a sigh, letting it rest on the bed in his hand as he leans back, looking down at Kylo. “So on Jakku. You… sensed FN-2187’s surface thoughts. That’s how you knew who’d betrayed us?”

Kylo shrugs lightly. “I guess.”

He yelps when Hux hits him on the shoulder, a little too hard to be playful. “What was that for?”

“Why the hell didn’t you say anything?” Hux demands, exasperated, “We could have arrested him right then and preempted the entire Starkiller Base disaster.”

Kylo ducks away, shrugging again. “It wasn’t my problem. Stormtroopers are your division.”

Hux heaves an absolutely disgusted-sounding groan of frustration, abandoning the empty glass on the bed to catch hold of Kylo’s hands where they still rest on his thighs. “You are absolutely incorrigible. Do you know that?”

“You’ve mentioned it once or twice,” Kylo grumbles.

“Anyway,” Hux continues, “I doubt being able to read minds is going to help us at all in the upcoming battle.”

Kylo frowns, nodding, then looks up at him. “I know. Hux, I know. But we need to do this, okay?”

Hux is quiet for so long, Kylo thinks he might be gearing up to argue. But then he just sighs deeply, and says, “Fine.”

Kylo extracts his hands from Hux’s grip, letting them slide up over his narrow waist and chest, undoing the top clasp of his uniform tunic and parting the collar to reveal the pale expanse of his neck. Hux tilts his head slightly to allow Kylo to lean up and press his lips against his adam’s apple, then just below his left ear, busying his hands with undoing Hux’s belt. Hux’s legs shift slightly, opening wider as one of Kylo’s hands slip inside his waistband. The other buries itself in Hux’s fine copper hair, pulling his head aside to expose more of his neck.

Kylo trails his lips over his throat, interspersing words with kisses. “Trust me,” kiss “I won’t let anything happen to you,” kiss “I promise.”

Hux reaches up to rest his palm on the back of Kylo’s head, murmuring, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” He’s about to add something else, but Kylo squeezes his cock and it comes out in a kind of strained groan, his fingers digging into his scalp.

And as Kylo sinks down to replace his hand with his mouth, visions of the Deimos keep repeating in his head, flashes of darkness and emptiness, and even their mutual release holds none of the sweetness Kylo longs to lose himself in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://ad-aphelion.tumblr.com/)!


	5. tfw your bf’s ex-squad can’t take a hint

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BB-8 always gets referred to as “he” in dialogue by its friends in TFA, so I’ve stuck to that convention.

_ It’s colder than usual on the bridge of the Finalizer. Hux’s breath puffs into white clouds as he exhales, burying his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. He’s killed the blaring alarms and sits in perfect silence in his command chair in the red-black-red of the emergency lighting, watching the uncaring stars outside the viewport go dark, one by one, consumed by large gaping maws and undulating tentacles. Above his head, a timer is counting down - close to zero, now - red LED milliseconds cascading like sand over the steadily decreasing display. He doesn’t know how he knows, but the knowledge that he is alone, all by himself at the end of everything, fills him with a kind of melancholy cynicism: of course it would be him. Of course this is how it would end. His command hat perches accusingly on the armrest of the chair. He removes his hands from his pockets, fitting it over his hair. Overhead, the PA system crackles to life. Short, chopped-up bursts of voices, hissing into static. Hux’s voice, somehow: “If there were any other choice…”. _

_ A sound like a looping record, wailing, cut off, wailing again; a long, terror-filled scream, interrupted by more static. The timer counts down. Hux’s voice says, “It’s really quite simple. Me, or them.” Scratching sounds and a long, low moan that either comes from the speaker, or from somewhere else. Hux says, “All systems are down.” The emergency light flashes, red, black, red. He is alone. Afraid. _

_ From behind him comes a sibilant, hydraulic hiss - the bridge door opening. Only, if he’s alone on the Finalizer, then who’s at the door? He half-turns to look behind him. In the doorway stands a tall figure in a white spacesuit, opaque silver helmet covering its face, the command bridge reflecting a distorted half-moon in its visor. Its hands raise, start to lift the helmet off its face. Above Hux’s head, the timer reaches zero. Hux’s voice says, “Goodbye.” _

_ Fire engulfs the bridge, swallowing everything with a screeching sound just on the highest edge of hearing, a searing pain as radiation tears through his skin, his bones, melting him into a shadow on the floor --- _

Hux’s eyes fly open. It takes him a while to remember where he is: the dim, grey light and the smell of old wood and rusted metal are jarringly unfamiliar, and for a confusing moment he’s convinced he’s back on Snoke’s planet. But the heavy weight of Kylo’s arm resting over his waist and the warmth of his large body pressed into his back are grounding, and through the hazy murk of sleep, memories of the red moon and rickety old space saloon - and the Deimos - slowly start falling into place.

Willing his pounding heart to slow down, he takes a few deep breaths, lifting one hand to rub at his eyes with his palm. It’s dark in the room, dusty. The sound of crickets chirping outside pours into Hux’s newly-awakened consciousness.

There is another knock on the door, almost tentative. Hux pauses. For a second the dream catches up to him again, the fear of the unknown waiting outside the door - but he’s long past the age of worrying about the proverbial monster under the bed, so he stamps down on the adrenaline racing through him and shoves Kylo’s arm off his waist, clearing the sleep from his throat and leaning up on one elbow. “What?”

The door creaks open a slit, allowing bright, artificial light from the corridor to pour through the gap and right into Hux’s eyes. He lifts a hand to shield them, peering at the disturber. It’s FN-2187, half poking his head into the room. (Hux suppresses the idiotic rush of relief at the fact that he isn’t wearing a spacesuit).

“Kylo Ren,” FN-2187 starts, “General Organa has...” He trails off when he sees Hux, blinking, before pulling back to look at the doorframe of the room in confusion. He’s just leaning back inside with a little frown when Kylo sits up behind Hux, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand and stifling a yawn over the words, “What time is it?”

FN-2187 stares at them both, looking decidedly shocked. Hux glares at him, expectantly, awaiting the inevitable discomfiture. Still battling disbelief on various levels at his current choice of bed partner, he finds himself more than a little sympathetic towards the ex-Stormtrooper.

FN-2187 opens his mouth as if to say something, then shuts it with a quick frown. After a moment, he tries, “Ah. The General, that is to say, General Leia, I mean General Organa. She wants us all to convene downstairs for a meeting.” He looks at Hux and Kylo, eyes flickering between them. Hux can almost see the wheels turning in his head.

He snaps, “Was there anything else?”

FN-2187’s eyes snap to the ground and he backs up with a mumbled, “No, si--”. (He closes the door a bit harshly on the honorific, stopping himself just short of finishing it).

Hux flops back down onto the thin pillow, scrubbing at his face with both hands. That went swimmingly. Now he’s going to have to add ‘explaining to the Resistance General why you’re fucking her son’ to the list of topics he was really rather hoping to avoid discussing in his life, ever.

He drags his hands down his face, sighing through his fingers. Echoes of the dream still crawl at the edges of his mind, filling him with an ominous sense of foreboding. He’s always had violent dreams, but this one felt so real, so intimate…

Next to him, the bed dips and shifts as Kylo rearranges himself, thick tresses of soft hair tickling Hux’s breastbone before the weight of his head comes to rest on his chest. Hux lifts his arms to accommodate him, looking down at the mop of black below his chin. One of Kylo’s hands comes to rest on Hux’s stomach. He appears to be watching it rise and fall with Hux’s breathing.

Exhaustion tugs with a familiar strain at the back of Hux’s eyes, scratching up into the inside of his forehead, prickling. He didn’t sleep, much. Even the pleasant haze of orgasm wasn’t enough to chase the horrific images of the Deimos from his mind. Hours of lying awake in the dark with his own thoughts had done nothing but terrify him even further, until he’d gotten fed up with being scared and started doing something about it, relieved to fall into the familiar patterns of strategy and design until Kylo’s deep, even breathing eventually lulled him into sleep.

Inside Hux’s head, Kylo’s mind-voice says,  _ “I can’t see a way out of this. The Force can’t show it to me, not if it’s being consumed by these things.” _

“Well then,” Hux answers out loud, “I guess we’ll just have to rely on intellect and tactics, like normal humans. Guess you’ll have to learn a new skill.”

Kylo lifts his head, resting his chin on Hux’s chest to look up at him. His eyes flicker between Hux’s, and the familiar pressure of his mind pushes against him. Hux projects at him,  _ “Stop that.” _

Kylo does, pushing himself up off Hux and into a sitting position. He runs a hand through his hair, which, of course, falls in perfect tresses to his shoulders with no evidence of having been slept on. Fucking Force users.

Their clothes, having been haphazardly discarded all over the room last night, lay in two neatly-folded black piles on the table, cleaned and pressed with precision. Their boots are stacked in a tidy row by the wall, and the bottle of whiskey Hux opened the night before has been refilled, a clean glass perched on its neck. Droids, Hux tells himself. It has to be cleaning droids. Even if they’re quieter than any droids Hux has come across in his lifetime…

Suppressing a shudder, he pads to the bathroom, the old wooden floorboards creaking and groaning beneath his feet. He firmly ignores the almost physical weight of Kylo’s stare on his backside. He wouldn’t put it past Kylo to have been the source of his nightmare, intentionally or not. He still has only the barest idea how the Force even works, and Kylo is just as scared as Hux. Everyone here is.

He has to feel around the wall for a light switch, muttering about ancient technology as light floods the tiny bathroom. There is a dirty mirror fixed to the wall on the right of him, rusted around its unfinished edges and flecked brown and white. Beneath it, a metal basin sags from its hinges on the wall, perched precariously on an old recycling unit, hundreds of tiny tubes and exposed wiring disappearing into a panel in the wall behind it. Hux fights back a groan. Of course - this is a desert moon. Fresh water wouldn’t be in huge supply.

A glance at the shower confirms his suspicions - it’s a sonic unit, similar to the units in the Stormtrooper barracks on the Finalizer, with none of the luxury of real running water that is afforded to the officers’ decks. Simple decontamination. A small keypad set beneath a dark LED display controls the temperature, pressure and frequency of the unit, but the temperature control button is missing, exposing the little coil of wiring underneath it, rusted and dead. Fantastic. A cold, waterless shower is exactly how he was hoping to start his day.

He steps up to the mirror with a sigh, making a face at his reflection - a tuft of red hair sticks up on the left side of his head, his long fringe, usually slicked back, draping over his eyes. He uses the tepid water from the sink in a half-hearted attempt to pet it into place, smoothing down the sides as best he can. A shadow of stubble has appeared on his jaw, scratching his thumb and forefinger lightly as he rubs at his chin. Well, nothing for it. At least, he reasons, abandoning his reflection, looking like a homeless derelict will make him fit in with the members of the Resistance.

Stepping into the shower, he keys in a low-frequency, high-pressure setting and initiates the cycle. He presses one hand to the wall as muted waves of sound start rolling over him, depressing his skin lightly with every low pulse. He closes his eyes with relief. He can practically feel the grime and sand of the desert dissolve off his skin. It’s freezing without the heat setting, and goosebumps prickle all over his body, racing over his arms and chest. But it’s also deeply satisfying. He hates being dirty.

A warm hand snakes across his waist from behind, pulling him back and flush against a broad, hard chest. Hux squirms, turning enough so he can glare at Kylo, who once again proves that terrible timing can be an actual human talent. Kylo only smiles at him, a bit predatory, and turns him by the shoulders, pressing him back against the wall of the unit. Large hands grab Hux’s wrists, pinning them beside his head, and, okay, fine. On a scale of one to getting clean, being flattened against a wall by a very broad chest and a half-hard cock rates pretty pleasantly. Heat radiates off Kylo, soaking into Hux’s skin, the ever-present haze of his power rich and heavy around them both.

Hux will admit that there are probably worse ways to spend a morning. But the Resistance are waiting, the Deimos are still coming, and it probably isn’t a good idea to get distracted.

Probably.

He tugs on his wrists. “Now is not the time for shenanigans, Kylo. They’re waiting for us down in theaah…” his sentence devolves into a low moan as Kylo bites lightly at his collarbone, leaving a trail of kisses up his neck.

“So let them wait,” Kylo murmurs from the region of his adam’s apple, warm, wet lips mouthing over it. Before he can stop himself, Hux feels his traitorous neck tilt to the side to give him more room, tempted for a second to just give in and get distracted, just for a while; to keep the Resistance waiting.

But no. The sooner they can discuss what they are going to do to save the galaxy, the sooner Hux can get back to his original plan of ruling it.

He tugs his wrists out of Kylo’s grip, pushing him away by the shoulders lightly. Kylo doesn’t back down, shoving Hux back into the wall and attaching his mouth to one shoulder. And of course Hux just had to choose a man roughly the size of a tank for a bed partner, nearly impossible to move unless he wants to be. Hux beats ineffectively at one muscled shoulder until Kylo uses the Force, flattening his wrist uncomfortably against the wall. He’s kissing Hux’s jaw, using his body to keep him pinned to the wall, and that’s it, Hux has had it.

Using his free hand, he grabs a fistful of Kylo’s soft hair, pulling his head back as far as it’ll go so he can scowl at him. “So which of us is going to tell your mother she had to wait because you were fucking me right upstairs in this nasty, decrepit old sonic unit?”

It works, instantly. Kylo blanches, hunching in on himself, and goes soft against Hux’s thigh. He looks up at him with a disgusted frown, and says, “Please never mention my mother and the word “fucking” in the same sentence again.”

“Exactly,” Hux agrees, “So get. Off.” And when he uses both hands to push Kylo away, he goes. Keeping him at arm’s length, Hux continues, “Let’s just get cleaned up and get down there.”

For a moment Kylo looks like he might disagree, chewing on his lower lip, but then he inclines his head, stepping away from Hux as best he can in the limited space of the sonic and turning into the pulses, raising his arms to aid the cleansing process.

Hux turns as well, so they are standing back to back, scrubbing his fingers over his arms and relishing in the feel of oil and grime disintegrating under his fingers.

“Who says ‘shenanigans’, anyway?” Kylo says after a short silence, bumping Hux’s back lightly with his own, “Do you ever stop being a pompous ass?”

“Do you ever stop being a persistent asshole?” Hux fires back. Satisfied that they are both as clean as they’re going to get, he reaches out to shut off the pulses. “That’s just the way I talk.”

Kylo grumbles, “And I’m just used to getting what I want,” and squeezes past Hux, flattening him against the wall a bit to step out of the sonic and leaving him cold in the sudden absence of his body heat. Hux follows, rubbing lightly at the goosebumps pebbling his arms.

The golden light of morning is just starting to seep through the missing boards over the window. Outside, the chorus of crickets has been replaced by a single bird’s lazy, high pitched trill, but it’s otherwise quiet enough for the rustle of Kylo’s clothes, as he starts to get dressed, to seem loud in the small room.

Hux fetches his datapad from where it has been neatly laid out next to his clothes, pressing his thumb on the fingerprint reader to unlock it. No new notifications. The last reports from Hux’s squadron of Stormtroopers, standing guard around the perimeter, made no mention of any signs of life in the outpost. But one addendum, almost tentatively added right to the very end of the report, briefly stated that the ancient speeder parked right outside the building had disappeared. It went on to say that the ‘troopers were not able to find any tracks. And, very briefly (as they were certainly aware of Hux’s views on the use of conjecture in field reports), added: “If there are any people in this town, they move as silently and quickly as ghosts.”

Rubbish. He’s sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation for this, as there is for all things. Even magic is only unexplained science - a sentence he’s thrown in Kylo’s face on more than one occasion. He tosses the datapad onto the desk, turning back to the room.

Broken shafts of orange light fall diagonally across the bed, leaving one triangled half in shadow and seeping into the rumpled sheets, bundled at the foot of the old mattress. Kylo, already in his breeches, sits on the edge of the bed, shimmering dust motes swirling in the light around him as he bends to lace up his boots.

Hux dresses more slowly, watching Kylo from the corner of his eye; or to be more precise, admiring the shift of muscles in his back as he stands up to fasten the belt around his waist, the lean stretch of his arm as he fetches his tunic from the table.

Kylo pauses with his hand outstretched, tilting his head slightly, then looks at Hux with this infuriatingly smug expression on his face and Hux just knows he’s been caught, knows that Kylo knows that he knows, and finds the blush crawling up Hux’s neck very amusing. Hux scowls, grabbing his tank from the pile of his clothes on the table and jerking it down over his head. Before Kylo can say anything, he creates a very vivid mental image of something that would be extremely uncomfortable for him, holding it in the forefront of his mind like a shield. He focuses on it, concentrating on picturing every little detail while he tugs on his jodhpurs, zips up his boots, tugs his tunic into place.

When he looks up, he finds Kylo staring at him. “…Hux, I don’t think lightsabers are meant to--”

Hux cuts him off with, “We’re already late. Let’s get downstairs, shall we?”, and slips his datapad into his pocket, leaving the room without checking whether he’s followed. Fiddling with his hair, he starts down the creaking wooden stairs, avoiding one with a deep crack down its center and keeping near the wall. As he reaches the landing and turns the corner, he hears Kylo’s uneven steps start to descend behind him.

“Out of the two of us” he grumbles softly at Hux’s back, “I think we both know who’d be taking it, anyway, and it wouldn’t be--”

“Stop,” Hux says.

Kylo continues, the slightest hint of a smile in his voice, “You’re already taking my di--”

“No,” Hux says.

“It’s kind of like a lightsaber anyway, the size and--”

Hux does an about-face and reaches up to put his entire palm over Kylo’s face, hissing “I will literally shoot you if you start comparing your cock to a lightsaber. I will go outside, fetch my blaster, and shoot you.”

Kylo mutters something incomprehensible, words muffled behind Hux’s hand and his breath warm on his palm. Hux doesn’t deign it with an answer. He pulls his hand away and, managing only by extreme effort of will not to give him the middle finger, turns back down the corridor towards the conference room.

Their decrepit droid concierge is leaning a little precariously against the wall, shoulders stilted at an angle and its single eye dark. Hux is carefully stepping around it when it surges to life with a sudden clatter of gears and rusted parts, the eye flickering orange and blue as it raises its head to stutter over the words, “Go-- Good moooooorning, General Hux of the Fi--iisrt Order.”

Hux starts, heart leaping into his throat, and flinches to the side before he can stop himself. The droid quiets down, looking at Hux expectantly. Hux fights the urge to kick it. Willing his heart to slow down, he scowls at the droid, and then turns it on Kylo, who snorts softly enough behind him that it might be just Hux’s imagination. (He’s willing to bet it isn’t.)

The droid stammers a similar greeting at Kylo as he walks past, petting it on the head lightly with a smug smile in Hux’s direction before entering the conference room. Hux wonders if there are any planets that consider being insufferable a crime, possibly on punishment of death, and, secondary to that, what it would take to get Kylo Ren incarcerated on one of them.

The single lightbulb in the conference room still plunges its furthest corners in darkness, filling the room with an air of mystery, dark and foreboding despite the warm daylight outside as Hux follows Kylo inside. Someone has prepared a breakfast, of sorts: large plates of strange, reddish-green oval fruits squat near the side of the table, long, yellow fronds draping over the edges; a stack of small, square biscuits that leave crumbs all over the place and look decidedly dry and bland; and a large, metal decanter of what Hux very sincerely hopes is caf.

FN-2187 - Finn, he corrects himself - and the scavenger, Rey, are seated near the far wall, staring distrustfully over their own, steaming mugs as Hux and Kylo enter. Rey twists her seat slightly from side to side, watching as Kylo slides a tin plate off the stack on the table and helps himself to a substantial pile of fruit and biscuits before flopping down in the hoverchair opposite her, the chair dipping under his weight before its artificial gravity auto-corrects.

Hux, who hardly ever eats breakfast and doesn’t have a great track record with digesting anything that isn’t standard-issue star destroyer rations, forgoes the fruit and biscuits in favor of taking a long whiff of the liquid inside the decanter. Definitely caf, thank god. He fills one of the six mugs resting on the side of the table to the brim, and sits down next to Kylo.

A pregnant silence hangs over the room. Finn is staring at them both with a deep frown that Hux doesn’t think is purely mistrust. Rey, a pile of food almost as large as Kylo’s in front of her, is also watching them, if markedly less suspiciously. She looks more curious, like she’s examining some foreign species, food disappearing into her mouth faster than Hux thinks he’s ever seen anyone eat.

When he’s had enough of listening to the sounds of people chewing and swallowing, Hux breaks the silence. “I trust you’ve had a good evening.”

“Some of us certainly did,” Finn mutters into his mug, turning his frown on the half-eaten fruit in front of him.

Rey glances at him, opening her mouth as if she’s about to ask something, but then Organa and the pilot come into the conference room, closing the door behind them. Organa looks like she didn’t get much sleep. Hux supposes none of them did.

Organa forgoes the food, greeting Rey and Finn softly and sitting down with Dameron around the corner of the table. Out of the group from yesterday, only Luke Skywalker is missing, conspicuous in his absence. Hux checks the corners of the room just in case, peering into the dark, but they seem empty.

The Resistance General folds her hands together, resting them on the reflective black surface lightly to address Hux. “Have you considered our proposal, General?”

Hux leans back in the hoverchair, crossing his legs and resting his mug of caf on his knee. “I have. We’ll work with the Resistance.”

The relief on Organa’s face is almost embarrassingly instant. She exhales a sigh, and says, “Thank you. You’ve made the right--”

“But,” Hux interrupts her, “if we are to do this, we must think it through very carefully.” He puts the caf on the table, getting up and folding his hands behind his back. Pacing has always helped him think, helped focus his energy and channel his ideas into rational order. He starts a slow circuit around the table. “Even the combined forces of the First Order and Resistance army - such as it is - won’t mean a thing if these… Demios… are really able to use the Force against us.”

Organa inclines her head, turning her gaze to follow Hux. “It’s the one thing that we haven’t been able to see a way around. Even with three strong Force users on our side, it feels hopeless to try and go up against them. The odds are…,” she sighs, “...insurmountable.”

Next to her, Dameron lays one hand on her arm. “Luckily,” he says with a grin, “Insurmountable odds are kind of our thing. We’ve gotten through impossible situations before. We’ll come up with something.”

“Luckily,” Hux interjects, “I have devised a plan so you won’t have to.”

Opposite the table from where Hux is, Kylo pauses with a biscuit halfway to his mouth, narrowing his eyes at Hux. “You have? When?”

“Last night,” Hux says, keeping his face perfectly straight.

The biscuit drops to the plate as Kylo hisses, “Last night?”

Hux avoids eye-contact as he completes his circuit around the table. It’s not as though he can’t strategize and have his cock sucked at the same time. He knows Kylo hears this thought by the way his free hand clenches into a fist. He only hopes Kylo is the only one to hear it.

Hux stops behind him, ignoring his murderous stare and resting his hands on the back of Kylo’s chair to look at the members of the Resistance. “Three Force users don’t stand a chance in hell against these things, no matter who they are, no matter how strong the fleet supporting them.”

“Thanks,” Dameron cuts in, crossing his arms, “That’s a great plan you got there. Step one: Demoralize the troops. Step two: Die, probably.”

“If you’ll let me finish,” Hux says, coldly. “They eat the Force. It’s what sustains them, drives them inexorably, unstoppably forward. So,” he lifts one hand, making a tight fist, “What happens if we sever them from it?”

Organa nods slowly, looking up at Hux. “Well up their supply of the Force, like a dam. Redirect the flow so they can’t get to it. Weaken them.”

“Then the fleet swoops in and blows them to bits,” Rey says, nodding excitedly.

Finn, frowning slightly, holds up one finger and says, “Even if the fleet’s arsenal is big enough to do that, we have no way of knowing what will happen when we cut off their food supply.”

“One of three things.” Hux ticks them off on his fingers: “One, they go after the Force stream. As I understand it, we aren’t currently in possession of enough information to know whether they are one, multi-faceted hive creature, or multiple creatures traveling in a conglomeration. They may split up into separate beings, chasing their food source, which makes for smaller targets. Easier to kill.

“Two, survival instinct kicks in and they attack us out of self-preservation. Again, we don’t have enough information to even begin assuming what kind of offensive capabilities they have, if any, but it would be irresponsible and dangerous to disregard the possibility that they might be aggressive by nature.”

“The odds of us surviving an attack like that are… not great,” Finn mutters.

Hux nods. "No, they aren't. If they do attack, all we can do is run, and keep running. However, we can’t completely discount the possibility that they might just… stop.” He spreads his hands to the sides. “Considering that they consume the Force to keep mobile, it’s not unreasonable to hypothesize they could simply go dark if we remove it from them, dead or comatose, like a datapad without a powercell.”

“In any case,” Organa cuts in, “they move slowly. However they respond, it will buy the fleet enough time to attack, and hopefully weaken them enough for the attack to be effective.”

“Okay,” says Rey, “but this all depends on the assumption that we’ll be able to redirect the flow of the Force, away from them.” She exchanges a worried glance with Organa. “What if we’re not strong enough?”

“That’s not an option,” Hux says, simply, because it’s not.

Organa bites her lip, unlacing her hands and pressing them palm-down on the surface of the table. “This can work, I think. But everything will depend on Rey and Luke…” She glances at Kylo. “And you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Kylo says darkly, “I’ll do my part.”

“You will, of course,” Hux directs at Organa, “be commanding the Resistance fleet from the Finalizer alongside me.” He doesn’t quite make air quotes when he says ‘fleet’, trusting his voice to relay his sarcasm.

Organa raises one eyebrow. “Will I?”

At the same time, Dameron says, “No way in hell.”

“It’s logical,” Hux explains, “She’s a big warship, with brand new, fully functional equipment, most notable of which are her extremely durable shields.” He lets the implication of that sink in. He’s seen the dilapidated, barely-airborne husks of rusted metal the Resistance calls ships.

Finn makes a face. “I hate to say this, but it makes sense.” He turns to look at Organa. “The Finalizer is probably going to be the safest place for you.”

“I don’t like it,” Dameron interjects, shaking his head. “Going there alone is not a good idea. I’ll come with you.”

“Poe, no.” Organa reaches out to touch his arm lightly, “You’re our best pilot. The battle would be lost without you in the field. We need you out there.”

Dameron looks like he might protest. “You give me too much credit, ma’am. I really--”

“I’ll go,” Finn suddenly says.

“Finn!” Rey exclaims in protest. When everyone has turned to look at him, Finn continues, “I know my way around the Finalizer. It makes sense.”

Rey, frowning, says, “Finn, no. You can’t go back to that place… Not after everything you went through to get out.”

“Look, it’s fine,” he tells her, taking both of her hands in his. “I’ll be okay.”

“At least take BB-8,” Dameron says, looking at Finn plaintively, “He’ll keep an eye on you.”

Finn nods, and Hux isn’t sure what exactly they expect the little BB unit to do against a potential threat on his ship: Look adorable at it? Roll over its toes?

Rey looks unhappy, letting go of Finn’s hands to hug onto one of his arms, resting her head on his shoulder.

Hux sits down in his seat next to Kylo again, picking up his mug of caf, having cooled to exactly the right temperature while they were talking. He takes a sip, and only barely manages not to spit it right back out again. He’s had some foul-tasting caf in his life, but never so bad as to threaten to remove the very enamel off his teeth. Swallowing with some difficulty, he continues: “While the fleet moves into position, Skywalker, Ren and the girl will take a small, inconspicuous ship and fly as close to the Deimos as possible to begin redirecting the Force away from them.

Rey and Kylo say, “The Falcon,” at exactly the same time, then pause to frown at each other.

Kylo says, “We’ll need a pilot. I’m guessing the three of us will be a bit occupied.”

“I have someone in mind,” Hux says. He supposes he’s going to have to either offer XN-336 a very substantial raise, or threaten one of his loved ones until he agrees.

Organa nods. “Then it’s settled.” She sighs, “I can’t help but feel like this is a suicide mission.” 

Rey gives her a sympathetic look. “But who will defeat the Deimos, if not us? We have to at least try. As long as we--”

A shrill, electronic wail interrupts her, accompanied by the rumbling sound of the little BB unit, trundling into the room at top speed and skidding to a halt at Dameron’s feet, frantically beeping and jittering.

Dameron half lifts out of his chair with a concerned, “What is it, buddy? What’s--”

“They’re here.” Kylo says, softly. He stands, the plate he’d been holding clattering to the floor. And Hux knows - he just  _ knows _ \- his day is about to be ruined.

It’s as if the world goes silent; all sound dampened and muffled until the only thing Hux can hear is his own heartbeat, everything seeming to move in slow-motion. Kylo is moving, his cloak undulating in a slow wave as he turns towards the door. Hux blinks, head edging around inch by inch until he finally faces the same way, his mug slipping out of his grasp. It takes an age to crash to the floor, liquid spiralling gracefully in a slow arc, glittering in the lamplight from above.

And there they are.

Three hooded figures, black-clad and ominous, shades of dark silhouetted in the rectangle of stark white light through the door. The frontmost figure, stepping half into the circle of light, wears a mask vaguely resembling a skull.

_ Oh,  _ thinks Hux.  _ This asshole. _

He knew letting Skullface Ren escape Snoke’s planet was a mistake. He knew it would come back to bite him in the arse, even suspected it would do so spectacularly. But in the confusion following the attempted coup of his ship and the immediately-following commotion induced by Organa’s message, an attack from the remaining Knights of Ren, so soon after Snoke’s demise, is the one thing he hasn’t prepared for.

And there he is, Skullface Ren in all his lumbering glory, flanked by a square-figured Knight with a long bostaff, and a slim, prominently female Knight tapping the back of what appears to be a massive cleaver on one upturned palm.

Kylo starts to take a sluggish step toward them, and time snaps back in place, Hux’s heart racing to catch up. He finishes straightening up, scowling at the Knights, and laces his voice with extra derision to hide how disconcerted he is by their appearance. “We meet again.”

Dameron, already standing, asks, “Who are they, now?”

“Don’t know,” says Rey, slipping out of her chair and sinking into a defensive stance, “But it can’t be good.”

Skullface Ren raises one arm, leveling an accusing finger at Hux. His deep voice booms out over the room, echoing into the dark corners. “For the murder of Supreme Leader Snoke, we sentence you to death.”

Hux rolls his eyes. He wants to say, ‘Get in line.’ Instead, he reaches for the handblaster at his hip, only to remember that none of them have any weapons, and, because that isn’t already humbling enough, that giving them up was his own bright idea.

A series of clicking sounds scratch over Hux’s mind, uncomfortably, rattling in the space just behind his eyes as Kylo takes another step towards the Knights, hands held out in front of him in a pacifying gesture. When he says, “I don’t want to have to kill you, too,” it sounds like the end of a longer sentence, its beginning unsaid. 

Cleaver Ren levels her enormous blade at Kylo. “You killed our brothers and sister.”

“I had to,” Kylo says, softly pleading, “It was the only way. For too long the Knights of Ren have walked the path of Supreme Leader’s guidance without ever questioning where it was leading. But what if he  was wrong?”

Cleaver Ren jabs her blade at Hux. “He has corrupted you!”

“He has shown me the way,” Kylo shoots back, lowering his hands to clench his fists at his sides, and, Hux thinks, this is new. “Now that I’m Supreme Leader of the First Order,” Kylo continues, “we will no longer work in secret. We will no longer be Snoke’s agents in the dark.” More mind-clicking. Hux suppresses a shudder. Kylo finishes, “If you would just listen…”

There is a pause as his words catch up to Finn, Organa and Dameron. As one, they turn to stare at Kylo. Finn says, “ _ You’re _ the Supreme Leader now? What in Phasma’s metal underwear has been going on in the First Order?”

Bostaff Ren ignores them, directing his words at Kylo. “We will never fight for liars and traitors. You have betrayed the Knights of Ren. You are no longer our master.”

Kylo’s shoulders sag slightly, and he sighs. “Then you must die.”

“Now wait just one second,” says Dameron, looking alarmed. But he doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because Skullface Ren lunges straight toward Kylo.

Cleaver and Bostaff, who clearly don’t have any quarrel with the rest of the people in the room, come for Hux. Kylo lifts one hand and takes half a step back into a crouch, bracing himself and catching Skullface and Cleaver with the Force. Hux is no coward, but he is unarmed, and Kylo is basically a brick wall. It takes Hux roughly half a second to calculate the odds of staying where he is against using Kylo as a shield, and he inches in behind him, feeling only a little ashamed as he squeezes in between him and the table.

Rey surges forward, levering one hand on the table to leap over it and landing in a crouch right in front of Bostaff Ren. Flinging both hands out, she uses the Force to propel him backwards. It doesn’t work. He whirls his staff overhead and around, and as it spins around his body he flings the Force back at her.

She slides a few feet backwards, just managing to keep her balance, a shocked look of indignation on her face. Bostaff is nearly on top of her. Her face scrunches up angrily as she dodges, grabs one of the hoverchairs and twists into a spin, smashing the chair over Bostaff’s head. He goes down. Hux blinks, looking at Rey with a new kind of grudging admiration. Her size is clearly not a disadvantage - she fights dirty, inventively, and it reminds Hux a little of himself.

A jagged grunt draws Hux’s attention back to the other Knights as, with monumental effort, Cleaver Ren slowly breaks free of Kylo’s Force hold, lifting her arm inch by inch until the movement seems to break the rest of her body free. She lurches towards them, swinging the enormous blade. Hux backpedals, ducking away just in time as Kylo breaks his Force hold on Skullface to dodge the arcing swipe of the cleaver. He turns into it, coming up right inside her range, his palm making hard contact with the bottom of her jaw. Hux crawls under the table, coming up on the other side of it next to Dameron and Organa, whose eyes are riveted to the opposite wall, where Bostaff is lifting himself on one elbow, groggily. Rey lashes out with one foot, intending to kick him in the side of the head. He rolls at the last moment, swiping out with his staff. Rey goes down with a yelp. Finn is on Bostaff the next second, diving from out of nowhere and grabbing his shoulders to drag him off of Rey.

To Hux’s right, Dameron catches his eye, nodding his chin at the table. Hux catches his meaning almost immediately: Shield. They work together to tip the heavy table over onto its side, ducking in behind it. Dameron catches Organa’s sleeve, pulling her down with them.

“Let go!” she protests, “I refuse to hide like some--”

Cleaver Ren’s blade spins overhead, missing her by less than half a centimetre as Dameron pulls her down, hard. It thuds into the wall, embedding itself deeply into the old wood. Organa, staring at it in horror, nods, climbing over Dameron and squeezing in between him and Hux. “Alright, I’ll hide.”

Hux says, “They have no quarrel with you. You’ll be safe here.”

Dameron glares at him. “They seem to have a bit of a problem with you, though.”

The pilot nods at something behind Hux, but before he can turn to look a large hand grabs him by the collar, dragging him out from behind the table. His hands fly up, trying to pry loose the thick fingers, his collar pulled so tight around his neck he starts to choke. Panic fills him and he starts to flail, lashing out at his attacker - he catches a glimpse of Skullface Ren’s macabre mask as he twists around, trying to break his grasp,  to get his feet underneath him. It doesn’t work, and when he tries to gasp out a broken “Kylo!”, all that comes out is a strangled kind of gagging sound.

Spots are starting to dance in front of his eyes when electricity crackles close to Hux’s left ear. Skullface’s fingers tense for a moment, shaking, before he lets go of Hux entirely. Gasping for breath, Hux scrambles away, turning onto his back. BB-8 has rolled between Hux and Skullface, its little shock prong extended, and is furiously electrocuting the Knight, sending jolts of electricity straight into his thigh and stomach; any body part it can get close enough to. When Skullface reaches down, trying to punch it, the little droid dodges, rolling over his foot and tazering him right in the crotch.

“No--” Hux gasps, “No one disarmed the droid?!”

Skullface makes a decidedly un-Knightly sound that fills Hux with no small amount of petty satisfaction; he thinks he’s starting to understand why they would want BB-8 to accompany Organa to the Finalizer. The distraction allows Dameron to tackle the Knight, using his momentary weakness to grapple him to the ground.

Near the door, Kylo is facing off with Cleaver Ren. Without his lightsaber, Kylo’s fighting style is awkward and somewhat ponderous, but he approaches it like he does most things in his life: with all the finesse of an Imperial Walker and roughly the same destructive power. Cleaver, though she clearly has some skill in the Force, is at a massive disadvantage, and has started to tire, only barely managing to counter his heavy strikes.

Hux is getting to his feet slowly, trying to keep track of the position of the remaining Knight, when a heavy weight knocks into him from the side, barreling him to the ground. His breath leaves him in a rush all at once, and he finds himself starting to get tired of being manhandled. When the shock abates enough for him to manage a deep gasp of air, the first thing he sees is the top of Finn’s head, his arms wrapped tightly around his waist.

Hux thinks,  _ He’s trying to kill me. He’s taking advantage of the distraction to kill me while Kylo is occupied _ . Then,  _ Wait. That doesn’t make any sense. He needs me. He needs my ship.  _ Frowning, he looks down at Finn, who is busy untangling himself from Hux’s waist, then slowly tilts his head back to look up. Right above him, where his head was mere seconds ago, is a perfectly round, gently-smoking fissure in the wall. Splinters rain down on them, some still moderately on fire. Blaster shot. He hadn’t even heard it go off.

He swivels his head to look at the other side of the room. Rey is wrestling with Cleaver Ren who, with the loss of her blade, apparently turned to her backup weapon of choice - a small handblaster, now pointing straight up as Rey pushes her wrist back against the wall.

Hux turns back to Finn, staring at him. “You. You saved me?”

Finn only shrugs, sitting back to brush dust off his pants. “Yeah?”

“Why?” Hux manages after a while. The Resistance needs the Finalizer, but, to be honest, they probably don’t need Hux enough to endanger their own lives for him. If he were to ‘accidentally’ die in battle, well, they could even use his death as some sort of incentive to gain the First Order’s cooperation. ‘We tried to save him,’ they could say, ‘We did everything we could’.

Finn looks at him with this thoughtful, kind of pitying expression on his face. “ What you’ve done? The lines you’ve crossed? There’s no coming back from that.” His voice is grave, soft, eyes filled with the unspoken horror of a war he never wanted to fight, of red beams streaking across the sky. “You’ll carry that with you for the rest of your life.” He frowns slightly, looking away. “But people change, Hux. No one is beyond redemption… Not even you.”

He gets up to walk away, and Hux can only stare at him for the longest while. For once, he can’t think of a single thing to say.

Things gradually go quiet in the room, the sounds of scuffling and shouting slowing, then stopping altogether. When Hux finally makes it to his feet, the room is in complete shambles. Cleaver Ren’s giant blade is buried in her chest, hilt sticking straight up and a pool of blood slowly seeping from under her back. Skullface Ren is half propped against the opposite wall, his neck twisted at an impossible angle. And Kylo is standing over Bostaff Ren’s body, tossing Cleaver’s handblaster on top of the bleeding wound in the Knight’s stomach.

The glass surface of the holotable has been shattered, shards flung in little starbursts over the floor. There are more holes in the wall, smouldering and hissing, splinters of wood jutting out around them like spikes. Several pieces of what was once two hoverchairs litter the ground. A small fire illuminates one of the darkened corners of the room. Hux doesn’t look too closely at what is fueling it. Kylo has lost one glove, has blood on his face. Some of it looks like his own.

The scavenger, leaning on Bostaff’s bostaff next to him, looks relatively unscathed, apart from a bruise starting to form on one shoulder.

Kylo turns to her, and says, “I’m impressed. You’ve gotten strong in the Force.”

“I needed a teacher,” she replies coldly. “I found one.” She turns her back on him, walking over to Finn and Dameron, her expression dark. Finn takes one look at her and gathers her up in his arms, hugging her tightly.

Behind the ruined table, Organa is slowly getting to her feet, surveying the room in distaste. When her gaze finally lands on Kylo, she asks, “Who were they?”

“None of your concern,” Kylo replies, shortly, not meeting her eyes, “Not anymore.”

“Yeah?” says Dameron, using his ankle to shift aside the remains of one of the hoverchairs and stepping over the rubble, “Well, anything else we should know about that ‘isn’t our concern’?”

Hux looks at the bodies, at the small fire in the corner, at the shattered glass of the holotable, and thinks about the coup on the Finalizer, about trying to convince those same officers they will have to cooperate with the Resistance for all their sakes. No. No other concerns.

  
Nothing to be worried about at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m celebrating receiving 80 kudos on Gottmord by giving away a fic! One person (chosen via the random thing picker) who leaves a comment on this chapter before 10PM Japan time (GMT+9) on 14 October will receive a short kylux fic on the theme of their choosing ^^ Remember to leave a prompt in your comment!


	6. Interlude, part 1: Your own personal deity of non-specified allegiance to the Dark Side

Sunset lights the sky on fire, blazing through the dusty amber haze lining the horizon. Oranges and yellows and reds melt like watercolors through the mist, bleeding ocher into the violet of an early twilight before dissolving into a deep, endless black overhead, where the first stars are just starting to twinkle around the faded, dark and pockmarked outline of the moon’s grey planet. Dry grass rustles in the restless wind, dust and sand billowing in waves over the cracked earth. Kylo’s cloak whips around his calves, batting in the sudden gust. Around him, fireflies ride the breeze, their gently pulsating glow illuminating the ground like little heartbeats of light, and somewhere in the distance, the last, fading refrain of birdsong trails off into the darkness, unseen crickets picking up the harmony as night descends over the moon.

The sputtering rumble of the sublight ion engines of Kylo’s shuttle diffuses through the haze of the moon’s thin atmosphere, fading into grey noise and then silence as the ship breaks into the void of space. On the furthest edge of visibility, it streaks into a long, red and black blur as it jumps into hyperspace, carrying Hux and his mother towards the Finalizer. Lingering heatwaves from the engines ripple the moon’s horizon into wavering forms and unclear shapes until they, too, eventually settle.

Rey lowers her hand from where she’d been shielding her eyes, squinting into the last light of the setting sun as her hands settle on her hips. She’s standing to Kylo’s left, a little in front of him, her staff strapped to her back and the hilt of a knife poking from the top of her boot. The wind has dragged her hair out of its three little buns; it drapes in long loops over her neck and twists into tiny curls by her ears. She sniffs, bounces on the balls of her feet lightly. Eventually, she turns to Kylo to say, “Guess it’s just us, now.”

(Hux hadn’t said anything. Not as he stood at Kylo’s side, watching as Finn and Rey hugged tightly and Leia squeezed both of Luke’s hands; not as he turned away, the wind tugging strands of red from behind his ears and whipping them over his face; not as the closing ramp of Kylo’s shuttle swallowed him whole.)

In lieu of answering, Kylo looks away; focuses on the fissured red earth under his boots, the clumps of dry grass, deep roots thrust desperately down for whatever water there is to have, on the lazily drifting fireflies swarming like the gentle rise and fall of a tide against his legs.

Rey is looking at him like she’s expecting a response, but he really doesn’t have anything to say to her, and her shields are still very firmly in place, so he turns away, walking back to the square Veshok-wood building. The rusted speeder from the day before is back, sagging and ticking as it cools against the side wall. The Force shows Kylo a wavery, yellow apparition, a vision of the past - an old Twi’lek with a cybernetic leg that doesn’t quite work right, limping as he pushes the speeder against the building. His back is bowed, tiredly. Kylo squeezes his eyes shut for a second, and when he opens them again the vision has dissolved.

His face aches.

It’s unexpectedly dark inside the building, a few degrees colder than outside, and it takes his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dim light. The hydraulic components of the door, a few years past their guarantee, slide shut with a stuttering hiss behind him, and for a moment Kylo allows himself to lean back against it, staring straight ahead and fixedly not looking into the conference room, where what he must now do awaits him with a looming kind of heaviness perched just behind his ribs.

The Force whispers around him, carrying their names like a curse: Atlan. Ami. Jast.

Hux would say he’s stalling.

With no small amount of reluctance he pries himself away from the door, taking a few heavy steps into the conference room, where they lay waiting for him in the silence. The floorboards groan, old wood sagging slightly under his weight. The room is still in ruins - glass splinters and wood shavings litter the floor; the skeletal husk of a hoverchair, its leather cover torn off, slumps like the corpse of a dead animal over the burnt debris of a small fire; the mutilated holotable, glass surface shattered to expose the wiring underneath, still tipped on its side where it acted as a temporary shield. And three bodies, lined up side by side next to their weapons, neatly laid out against the wall in some kind of contemptible mockery of the way the cleaning droids had lined his and Hux’s boots up that morning.

Kylo swallows a sigh, resting one hand on the doorframe of the conference room. Of course Hux would leave him to deal with the bodies. Hux doesn’t like to get his hands dirty.

If he’s to be honest, Kylo isn’t exactly sure how it came to this. People close to him have been dying at an alarming rate recently, most at his own hand. At first, it seemed like their deaths served a purpose, that he was acting with meaning that would somehow become clear just as long as he didn’t stray from his course. But now he finds he’s not sure anymore. He feels like he’s lost the path somewhere, and lost the only person who’s ever been absolutely clear with him about what he should do next.

Kylo’s never really been very good with telling the difference between wanting something for himself, and wanting it because he was told to. Leia wanted him to train with Luke, his father had wanted him to be a pilot. Luke wanted him to be a gentle, strong, and brave Jedi. Supreme Leader wanted him to kill all the Jedi and let their blood seep into the edges of his power. The First Order wanted a weapon, a symbol. Kylo was all of these things, for all of them, and maybe for himself a little (or a lot, or somewhere in between). But the only thing he’s ever been absolutely sure of wanting for himself, only for himself, jealously and persistently, is Hux.

And Hux wanted this. Even if he didn’t plan far enough ahead to foresee the consequences of dragging Kylo along on his mad quest for power: the loss of the First Order’s benefactor and leader, the eradication of the Order of Ren, and for Kylo, the loss of his name and his title and the last years of his adolescence. For the first time in his life, Kylo finds himself free to decide his own fate, and it’s with no small amount of self-reproach that he realizes he doesn’t like it.

So he’ll follow Hux, because Hux is the only thing he’s sure he really wants anymore, and he’s come all this way and maybe it’s too late to turn back.

The masks of the Knights stare up at him, vacant and empty, victims of his own faltering conviction.

With a sigh, he walks over and uses the toe of his boot to shift Ami’s massive cleaver away from her body. The metal scrapes with a gravelly sound over the wood, floorboards creaking as Kylo bends down to hoist her into his arms. Her head lolls back, a strand of blond hair escaping from under her helmet. The long, fresh scar ridging Kylo’s shoulder and collarbone strains under her weight, tugging at its tight edges. He ignores it.

The building’s front door stutters open to reveal Rey, right where he left her, luminescent in the light cast by the fireflies. They cling to her legs, circle her waist like a belt of tiny stars, and when she waves her arm slowly in front of her the swarm sways with it, swirling and twinkling around her. She is smiling, enamoured by the little creatures, trailing her hands through their flickering lights. But when she sees Kylo, it fades, her arms sinking slowly to her sides.

A few feet from the building, a lonely thorntree stands sentinel over the farthest boundary between the town and the desert, and it’s this he heads for, shoulder straining and side aching.

As he lowers Ami carefully to the thorn-littered, cracked earth under the tree, arranging her arms next to her sides, Rey asks, “What are you doing?”

Kylo considers not answering. She already knows. But he’s going to have to face his reluctance to speak to her sooner or later, and he’s afraid she might keep prodding if he doesn’t say anything, so he straightens up and mutters, “Burying them.” And, because he feels for some reason like he should elaborate, “I can’t just leave them here.”

Not like he’d left Darik and Revan and Jessa, on Snoke’s planet. Not like he’d left Jast, for whom Jessa’s death was a tragedy he could never overcome; who would become a thing of wrath and vindication in the wake of Kylo’s weakness and follow him here, to this desert moon in the middle of nowhere, to his end.

To his annoyance, Rey follows him back inside the building, fireflies dripping off her like startrails. She steps over the threshold into the conference room, movements quick and bird-like, and when Kylo bends to gather up Atlan’s heavy body, she takes the Knight’s ankles, lifting them in front of her waist.

Kylo stops.

Rey says, “Let me help.”

“They were nothing to you,” he frowns, his scar aching deep inside his cheek.

Rey doesn’t reply, but looks at him with this kind of quiet resignation, and Kylo can’t tell if it’s sympathy or pity.

He lets her help.

Together, they work in silence to carry the bodies outside; lay Atlan’s and Jast’s corpses next to Ami’s under the straggly thorntree, arms tucked neatly next to torsos, legs straight and boots pointed to the sky. And when Kylo sits down a little apart from them, crosslegged on the dirt, fireflies swarming around him but not touching him, Rey stays, leaning against one of the wooden support struts of the rickety veranda, watching.

The wind has settled a bit, leaving behind the smell of dust and old leaves, and as the last sliver of sunlight disappears behind the horizon the air turns suddenly cold.

Kylo closes his eyes, travels deep inside himself and lets the world fall away into silence and darkness. He reaches into the endless well of the Force, its steady current swirling always through him and through all things, and lets his identity dissolve into it, fade away into the gentle ebb of it until it surrounds him completely, like water. He becomes one with it, leaving behind all his distress and physical pain, and when he is ready he rebuilds an image of the world around him in his mind, carefully constructing the long, empty road and the decrepit buildings lining it, the rusting speeder and the cobwebs and the far-off horizon blending into the stars, and the jagged branches of the thorntree, long barbs snagging in the wind.

Then he imagines holes in the ground, long and deep, three next to each other in a neat and precise row.

_ Ami. Atlan. _ He repeats the names in his mind, with guilt, with resentment, and with quiet apology.  _ Darik. Revan. Jessa. Jast.  _ They echo in the dark.

He isn’t sure how much time passes, but when he eventually surfaces again and opens his eyes, night has started to give way to dawn, the fireflies have gone to rest, and a cloud of red microgranules of dust hovers in the air in front of him, glittering in the very last purple glint of twilight over three perfectly hollowed-out graves.

To his right, Rey is curled up on the red earth, asleep.

Kylo uses the Force to lower the bodies into their graves, using the lingering emptiness of meditation as a careful mental shield. Snoke taught him they would live on in the Force. He has to believe he was right, if only about this one thing.

When he’s done he releases the dust and earth to cascade like gently sifting waterfalls into the graves. He watches quietly for a while, as the Knights disappear into the ground, until the first bird starts up its lonely song in the distance and he suddenly realises how exhausted he is. His clothes are covered in a fine sheen of red dust. His hands, when he turns them over to look at the palms of his gloves, are clean.

“I thought I would hate you,” Rey’s voice, soft with sleep, interrupts the quiet peace of dawn. She’s sitting up now, the rustle of her clothes loud in the still, cold air, and when Kylo looks at her she doesn’t meet his eyes, turning instead to look at the fresh mounds of dirt settling slowly in front of them. She says, “I wish that I could. I was so angry…”

She gets to her feet a bit stiffly and starts walking back to the building at the edge of the town; pauses next to Kylo and speaks at the vicinity of his chest with a frown. “But I just feel sorry for you.”

And just like that, Kylo’s shield shatters. He can’t speak past the sudden rage that fills his throat like oil, past the abrupt violence curling his fingers into talons and then into tightly-clenched fists, bearing down on his jaw and grinding his teeth together. The last vestiges of peace brought by his meditation dissipate like mist. He finds his lightsaber suddenly in his hand, and as Rey disappears inside Kylo clutches the hilt of it almost tightly enough to dent, hand shaking with the effort of not igniting it and going after her.

She has no right. No right...

Instead, he closes his eyes and focuses on his breathing, on the dull ache of the bowcaster wound in his side, twinging with every exhale. He waits until she’s disappeared completely, until she’s had enough time to go upstairs, until he’s certain he won’t see her if he goes inside. And then he waits some more, until the anger burning in his chest settles into a dull simmer, and he’s able to sheath the lightsaber again.

When he’s finally managed some semblance of calm, he follows her inside, quickly, boots thudding on the old wooden floors and the stairs groaning under his weight. He kicks the door to his temporary quarters shut a little too hard behind him; it rebounds off the rusted frame and slams into the wall before swinging shut, slowly, with a gentle creak.

Wisps of pre-dawn mist curl lazily through the jagged splinters of the broken window board, whitish-grey in the purple haze of first light. The bed has been neatly made, the chair pushed in precisely under the old, wooden table, the bottle of amber liquid - muddy brown in the dim light - in the exact same spot it was the day before. If not for Kylo’s ragged scarf, left behind by Hux and folded in a tidy square on the pillow, there would be no trace that they had been here at all.

Kylo makes a face and, moved by the irrational urge to upset this tidy order, flings himself down onto the bed, heedless of how filthy he is, and scrubs his hands over the sheets to rumple them at his sides. No trace of Hux’s smell remains on the pillow, or in the scarf, washed away by cleaning droids too helpful for their own good. Kylo’s not upset by this, he tells himself. He’s upset by the fact he just buried three people he considered allies, if not friends; by his own ever-present fear of the Deimos, always lurking on the back of his lids, in the after-images when he shuts his eyes. He’s not restless because this is the first night he and Hux have spent apart since they first slept together, on the stones by the river on Hux’s planet, with Kylo’s power so wildly out of control he isn’t even sure himself how he kept Hux whole throughout it. And he most certainly isn’t annoyed that Hux didn’t say goodbye.

He turns his head to frown at the wooden chair, old blue paint peeling in long strips off its back and legs. The slightest flex of the Force sends it crashing against the wall, and when that isn’t enough, a glare splits the table in two with a loud crack, the glass bottle crashing to the ground. Liquid spreads in a growing brown pool over the wooden floorboards, seeping through the cracks. It makes him feel a little better.

In the ensuing silence he suddenly realizes how hard he’s breathing; panting, heartbeat thudding against his ribs and in the hollow of his throat, blood rushing through his veins. He squeezes his eyes shut. He should try to rest, or meditate, but he’s still too worked up for it to be effective. His hand goes to the wound on his side, digging his fingers into it like Hux likes to, but the pain does nothing to focus him.

And when long minutes have ticked by and he becomes too frustrated with his own inaction, too embittered by his own thoughts, he gives in to the little voice in the back of his head nagging for attention and sits up, digging his personal subspace comm device from the back pocket of his breeches. He hesitates only a second before smashing his thumb on the icon to send a channel request to Hux’s IP.

There’s no answer.

A minute passes, Kylo’s free hand clenching and unclenching on his thigh. He opens a message box and types in, ‘Hux’, then erases it; gets as far as ‘I need to ta’, before deleting that too. Eventually he settles on, ‘Answer your damn comm when people call you’, and hits send before tossing the device onto the bottom of the bed with a growl.

Nothing for it. If he sits around here any longer he’s going to lose his mind, and he’s still covered in dirt. He’ll clean up, and try to get a few hours’ sleep, and in the morning (or later in the morning, anyway), he’ll leave on the Falcon with Rey and Luke. Just focus on the next step. Stop trying to see the end of the road.

He peels off his clothes on the way to the bathroom, tossing them in a dusty heap on the floor, briefly wondering if the mystery cleaning droids will be able to have them cleaned before he finishes his shower.

Avoiding the rusted mirror on the wall, he heads straight for the sonic unit and keys in a high-frequency, high-pressure setting. In the cold pre-dawn air, any kind of heat would be preferable (or for lack of that, a warm body pressed against his back) but he has to make do without, and stays in the sonic perhaps a little longer than strictly necessary, both hands pressed against the grimy wall, letting the pulses roll over his skin and press on the edge of pain into the scars in his side and shoulder and neck and face.

If nothing else, he feels a little calmer when he steps out (and certainly smells better). He avoids the mirror again while splashing some cold water from the basin over his face, letting it trickle into the slowly-healing scar splitting his cheek. It only stings a little, now.

When he steps back into the room, he finds his clothes have disappeared, and the bedsheets have been straightened. (The rubble of the chair and table look undisturbed, though; he has to step carefully over the splinters of wood and glass littering the floor to get back to the bed.)

Flopping face-down onto the hard mattress, he fumbles around blindly for his comm, dragging it up to peek at it with one eye. One missed channel request from Hux. His heart absolutely does not jump, and he doesn’t scramble to sit up: his side hurts from lying down on his stomach, that’s all.

He bites his lip, hesitating. He doesn’t really have a good reason to speak to Hux. He isn’t even really sure what he was intending to say to him. He briefly recalls his… Han Solo’s attempts at comm romance when Leia was away on political visits. They never worked, and lead to a blistering rebuke more than half the time, and Kylo suspects Hux would not be nearly as amenable as Leia to being interrogated on his current attire. But before he completely realises what he’s doing, he’s opened the link and pressed the icon to initiate a call.

He stares at the screen until it phazes from red to green, displaying the word “connected”, before pressing it against his ear.

Hux’s voice sounds annoyed, although Kylo’s rarely heard him sound any other way, so he can’t really be sure. “What is it, Ren? I’m busy.”

‘Ren’, not ‘Kylo’. Ah. He  _ is _ annoyed.

“What with?” Kylo asks, “Comm says it’s sixth cycle. You should be asleep.”

“And you called anyway. What if I  _ had _ been sleeping?”

“I could sense that you were awake,” Kylo lies.

“This fleet isn’t going to organize itself,” Hux clips, “I have rosters to draw up, rotation orders to sign. What did you want?” A slight pause. “Is something wrong?”

Kylo hesitates. “... No.”

“Then what the hell do you want?”

Kylo actually panics for a second, scrambling for words, before a wave of frustration rolls over him at the sheer idiocy of this entire situation. He pulls the subspace away from his ear and presses it against his chest; lies down and squeezes his eyes shut.

‘You should have said goodbye’ he could say, or, god forbid, ‘I just wanted to hear your voice’, which Kylo kind of feels would prompt roughly the same reaction as saying Starkiller Base was just a poorly-made copy of the Death Star.

He’s quiet too long. A tinny, faraway, “Kylo?” draws his attention back to the comm device. When Kylo puts it back to his ear he can hear Hux breathing, softly, and the rustle of his coat in the background as he moves around.

Eventually, Kylo manages, “Sorry. Shouldn’t have bothered you.”

This prompts a quiet sigh from Hux, whose voice softens slightly when he says, after a brief silence, “Phasma’s report said it’s been quiet on the Finalizer without you, lately.”

“Yeah?”

“No valuable equipment destroyed in over ten days.” Hux sounds amused. “Apparently it’s some kind of record. There was a party.”

Kylo huffs. “Did she go?”

“Of course she went. It was her idea.”

Kylo pictures her in full, shiny chrome regalia, holding one of the Finalizer’s steel cups in an armored hand, standing stock still in the middle of the breakroom as Stormtroopers and officers dance and mingle around her. Of course, the Finalizer doesn’t have parties, and he doesn’t really think Phasma would attend one in her armour if they did, anyway.

He’s still thinking about this mental image with a small smile when, without any conscious thought or permission from him, his traitorous mouth suddenly blurts, “I miss you.”

He blinks a few times, then grimaces and makes a fist, knocking it against his forehead. Stupid.  _ Stupid _ . ‘What the  _ fuck _ ,’ he mouths to himself, silently, because  _ really _ .

The silence that follows is excruciatingly long, and terrifyingly laden. He can still hear Hux breathing on the other end, but the rustling has gone quiet, as if he’s frozen in place.

Kylo opens his mouth to say something, anything, but Hux speaks first, interrupting him with, “Go to sleep, Kylo.”

And then he’s gone.

With a frustrated growl, Kylo tosses the comm onto the floor a bit too vigorously and pulls the pillow over his face.

 

\---

 

It can’t be too much later when a soft knock on the door wakes Kylo from a restless sleep. Luke, his voice muffled by the warped wood, says, “Kylo Ren. We’re leaving soon.”

It feels strange to be called that by Luke. It feel like he’s been Kylo Ren for so long that “Ben” has become only a word, no more than the echo of a dream he had long ago. But Luke’s voice, worn with age, sounds nothing like Ben’s old teacher, and the way he says his new name, so filled with regret, makes Kylo teeter on the very edge of the deep well of his past, a diving fall into memory he is not ready or willing to take.

When Kylo doesn’t answer, Luke knocks again, hesitantly, then leaves, his footsteps fading down the hall. Kylo blinks, slowly, then lets his eyes drift shut again for a moment. A patch of golden sunlight falls diagonally across his chest, dipping the very edge of the scar on his side in honey-coloured warmth. Outside, a strong wind is howling through the narrow alleys between beaten-down buildings and old recharging stands, gusting cloudy billows of red sand through the broken window boards. Kylo opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling for a while, dustmotes slowly drifting past his field of vision, and tries to stamp down on the guilt swirling in his gut, as it always does when he thinks about Luke.

It’s not long before his stomach starts protesting: he hasn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday, and his body is not happy about it. So he sits up, bedsprings squeaking, rubs his eyes with the back of his hand, and swings his legs off the bed.

The room has been tidied and cleaned, the chair and table fixed and sitting neatly in their old positions, the glass and whiskey cleared from the floor without so much as a liquid stain. His clothes from the previous night have been returned, washed and neatly folded on the table, and his personal subspace comm rests on top of the pile, its little power light flashing brief pulses of green at regular intervals.

Ignoring the sting of the wound in his right side, he slowly gets dressed: Breeches, undershirt, tunic, belt, boots, coat, and finally the helmet, settling over his face with the sanctuary of anonymity. He’ll happily hide behind it if it means not having to look Luke in the eye when he goes downstairs. The physical exertion of the fight the day before, and of carrying the bodies of the fallen Knights to their burial, have taken their toll on his body: his arms ache, the lightsaber burn cutting into his shoulder and neck pulsing with every heartbeat, a grim reminder of how weak he still is. He hasn’t slept enough, either, and he finds himself feeling exceptionally irritable.

He jams the subspace comm device into the inner pocket of his coat without checking for any new messages from Hux and stalks to the door, hauling it open only to run head-first into Hux’s Stormtrooper lieutenant. Right. He stayed behind to pilot the Falcon. The fact that Hux’s bodyguard is here while Hux himself is back on the Finalizer puts Kylo in an even fouler mood, and he pushes past him, interrupting the entirely too chipper “Good morning, si--” with a growled, “Out of my way.”

XN-336 swallows whatever he was about to say to Kylo, trailing behind him down the unsteady stairs. The droid custodian of this place, decrepit and unsteady as it is, wobbles to life as Kylo passes, but Kylo is in no mood for its stammering, no matter how helpful it’s only trying to be. He makes a cutting gesture with one hand, the Force lashing out in a long, whip-like tendril from his fingers and curling around the droid’s power cell, disabling rusted electron nodes and discharge tabs. The droid, one hand servo raised in greeting, shudders, then slumps to the side, its head lolling onto its shoulder, single eye going dark.

When he catches 336 looking at him a bit reproachfully, he mutters “Mercy kill,” and steps into the conference room without waiting for a reply.

The room has somehow been restored to perfect condition in the brief time Kylo was resting, everything exactly the way it was when they first arrived - the holo table, too new and modern for the old, wooden husk of the building; the leather hoverchairs, gently resting on air at exactly the right height to sink into; the walls, no sign of the splintering holes left by blaster bolts, no trace of newer wood to indicate the mended panels, just the same old, blackened wood as the rest of the building.

The holotable is again laden with Resistance provisions taken from the store of the Millennium Falcon: tiny red fruits on purple stems, green, sprout-like leaves lathered in yellow butter, tiny spice cakes and round slices of cold meats, four tin cups next to a large decanter of steaming black caf; Kylo’s stomach growls at the sight, his hunger rivalled solely by the level of his reluctance to take off the helmet long enough to actually eat.

Roughly half the provisions have been piled on a plate into a precarious mountain in front of Rey, who sits at the center of the long end of the table, cheeks puffing out slightly around a large mouthful of food. Luke stands to the side of her, black, cybernetic fingers wrapped around a steaming tin cup. He looks tired.

The scene of the two of them together, talking softly over breakfast, looks so peaceful, so right, that it stops Kylo in his tracks, a deep pang of regret bringing an almost physical pain to his chest. He’s tempted for a moment to turn around and go back upstairs - his stomach growls in protest - but XN-336 is crowding him from behind, and Rey has spotted him looming in the doorway, her sentence trailing off and a spice cake, almost perfectly halved by the half-moon imprint of her teeth, hovering in one hand near the plate.

She looks at Kylo looking at her, then glances at Luke, who is pointedly not meeting Kylo’s eyes. There ensues a very long silence during which none of them seem to know what to say, Kylo awkwardly shifting his weight in the door and Rey slowly putting her spice cake down on the side of her plate.

Kylo’s just starting to feel smothered by the heavy quiet when 336 clears his throat from somewhere behind him. “Excuse me,” the ‘trooper says mildly, “But you are very wide, and I’d like to get some caf before we leave.”

Kylo blinks, then twists to look at him, unaccustomed to such candor from a Stormtrooper. 336, seemingly unaffected, takes the opening and squeezes past him, sauntering into the conference room with an air of indifference and helping himself to some of the caf.

Rey looks down at her plate, hiding a small smile. Even Luke has lost some of the tension tightening his brow, and with the general mood in the room lifted, Kylo eventually persuades himself to step inside as well, taking off the helmet and putting it on the end of the table nearest the door before helping himself to some of the fruits and cakes. He sits down two chairs away from XN-336, whose surface thoughts are solely centered on the rich smell of the caf, which, Kylo knows vicariously through Hux, he should find objectively horrible. He pours himself a cup, anyway - he grew up on Resistance caf, and even the acrid sourness of it holds a kind of melancholy nostalgia for him.

He eats the buttered sprout leaves and cold meats on his plate too quickly to really taste them, focusing only on the act of chewing and swallowing and pointedly ignoring the other people in the room. He slows down only when the immediate hunger pangs have subsided a bit.

Luke is watching him, quietly. Kylo doesn’t need to be able to get a read off him to know what he wants to say, and it’s not a conversation Kylo is ready to have. He knows it will happen, eventually - with the close quarters they’ll be sharing on the Falcon, it will be unavoidable. There’s nowhere to run on that rusted heap of junk, and he’s outgrown the air vents he hid in as a child. So he’ll have to talk to Luke, sooner or later, but as long as the choice is up to him, he vehemently chooses “later”.

So when Luke starts with a carefully toneless, “Kylo Re--”, Kylo talks over him: “Where were you? Yesterday, when we were fighting. Where were you when we were attacked?”

He doesn’t catch Luke’s expression, doesn’t look at him at all, pushing a whole spice cake into his mouth at once. It’s dry and slightly salty, filled with tiny black seeds that crunch lightly when chewed. He thinks maybe Hux would like these cakes.

In his peripheral vision he sees Rey glance at Luke, hears the rustle of Luke’s grey robes as he leans over to put his cup on the table. Kylo abstractly wonders if he can feel the heat of the caf through his mechanical hand. Luke says, “I was gathering supplies for our… mission, I suppose is the right word to use. Provisions. The Falcon was only stocked for a few days of travel.”

Kylo swallows, then says, mildly, “Liar.” He focuses on picking tiny, red baubles of fruit off the purple stem on his plate. “You ran. Like you always do.”

“Excuse me?” Luke replies, and the hint of indignation in his voice makes him sound like the old Luke, the Luke Kylo knew when he was still Ben, for the first time since they met again.

Kylo says, “You were never good with confrontation,” and pops half the berries into his mouth. They’re unexpectedly bitter, the juice cold as it slides down his throat. He finally looks up at Luke, challenging him with his eyes.

He expects Luke to bite back, to fall right back into their old pattern of goading and bickering, but Luke’s years in isolation have done more to make him a Jedi than any amount of his old teacher’s training: he visibly schools his features, taking a deep, calming breath which is really more of a sigh, before reaching down to retrieve a large, worn canvas sack from the floor. He drops it on the table and it sags over, spilling the topmost of its contents onto the smooth glass surface: ration bars and little packets of dried fruits and chunks of bread wrapped in cloth. Kylo’s stomach sinks and he has to swallow to keep his breakfast from coming back up.

Luke folds his hands into the deep sleeves of his robe and says, coolly, “I was never the one who ran, Ben.”

Kylo feels his face twist into a frown, the lightsaber burn crinkling painfully over the bridge of his nose. He doesn’t have a reply to that, has no idea what to say, and the air in the dim conference room feels suddenly close again, too thick to breathe, bile burning at the back of his throat. He drops the last spice cake onto the plate half eaten and shoves his chair back to stand.

“I’ll get the Falcon ready for departure,” he mumbles and marches out, grabbing his helmet as he passes and barely waiting for the front door of the building to stutter open before surging out and into the cool morning air. A flurry of wind swirls sand and sprigs of dry grass into his eyes, whipping his hair about his face. Under the lonely thorntree at the edge of the road lie three perfectly even mounds of freshly-moved dirt, looking out over the long expanse of cracked desert earth leading from the town to the horizon. 

Kylo takes a deep breath, exhaling into a long sigh. Then he turns to face the Falcon.

This is going to be a very long trip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I commissioned the stunningly talented [flurgburgler](http://flurgburgler.tumblr.com/post/164102431963/another-commission-for-sarensen-for-their) to draw the scene of Rey and the fireflies:


	7. Interlude, part 2: The droid is still armed

When Hux turned four, he had his very first lessons on etiquette and proper speaking. He learned the art of making a positive first impression, a firm handshake and exactly the right amount of teeth to show when smiling, among other common courtesies intended to turn young boys into young gentlemen.

By the time he turned six, he could charm the kitchen staff into giving him an extra helping of his favourite dessert, and could converse with the ladies of the house for hours on topics ranging from gardening to Imperial history. He learned with whom he could talk freely - and around whom it was more to his advantage to stay quiet and listen. 

When he was eight, he’d learned a substantial amount of secrets his military family hadn’t intended him to, and he hoarded those, quietly, until he could one day weave them into conversations with those who sought to prevent his rise through the ranks as effectively as poison laced into wine; weaponized eloquence.

At the Academy, his talent for public speaking bought him quick popularity, and by the time he graduated, top of his class and three years ahead of his peers, he was considered the face of the new generation of Imperialists, the beloved symbol of a new world order, staring triumphantly from the fast-growing First Order’s fast-spreading public propaganda.

And yet, sitting across from Leia Organa in Kylo’s shuttle’s passenger compartment, both of them strapped to the bulkhead seats with nylon belts criss-crossing their chests, he finds he can’t think of a single thing to say. Outside the slitted viewports above her head, the incandescent silver smears of stars streak past in hyperspeed. The curving line of the black durasteel hull above them is broken only by two identical, indented squares where the advanced sensor suites are mounted just above the wings. The floor, an even grid made of the same Rhodium metal used to plate the Stormtroopers’ assault rifles, allows a direct view into the bowels of the engine hold, a mass of monochrome ribbed plastisteel piping, writhing wires and gently steaming containment units housing the shuttle’s warp vortex stabilizers. Lit only by the dim console floodlights, the hull is cast in deep shadows, shifting with the dancing startrails outside. 

Organa is staring at him, eyes drilling into his forehead until he can almost physically feel the weight of her gaze. He’s tried distracting himself by going over some of the remaining casualty reports from Starkiller Base (too painful); tried catching up on the latest news from the Outer Rim territories (nothing that doesn’t involve the “Hosnian Cataclysm” - and really, who came up with that tragedy of a name, anyway?); even tried a round of holochess against his datapad (the datapad won). 

It’s been going on for what feels like hours, just her, looking at him, and he’s about ready to admit that it’s just bloody creepy. Abruptly, Hux decides he has had enough. He frowns, putting his datapad down in his lap and looking up at Organa. “Was there something I could help you with?”

Organa blinks, then shakes her head a little. “Oh, no. I was just…” She bites her lip. “I was just wondering. What’s he like?”

Hux raises an eyebrow.

“My son,” Organa elaborates, “I haven’t seen him in so many years…”

Caught off guard, Hux looks away. Whatever he’d been expecting, suddenly facing maternal curiosity from Leia Organa had not been it. His instinctual urge is to respond by elaborating on just how big a pain in his arse Kylo has been these past few years; the upstaging, the constant bickering, vying for the Supreme Leader’s favour. But Organa is looking at him with the same, quiet manner Kylo has, staring right down into his soul, and he feels unnervingly compelled to dig deeper for a more honest answer. 

When he feels a familiar, if light pressure just behind his eyes, he realizes: Of course she can use the Force. Because apparently it’s too much to ask to just have a quiet shuttle ride back to his goddamn ship so he can think in peace for once and actually come up with a solid plan to save the goddamn Galaxy.

He sighs. Fine. She wants to know about Kylo? He could tell her how strong he is, that he can carry Hux’s entire weight in one arm, despite still fighting injuries that would confine lesser men to bedrest. He could tell her how big his hands are, that they can almost circle Hux’s waist when he holds onto him. He could tell her how good his cock feels, buried so deep inside him he can almost taste it.

Somehow, he does not think that is what Organa meant when she asked about her son.

Finally, he just settles on, “Kylo Ren can’t be described. You can’t put that much power into mere words.”

Organa looks at him quietly.

Hux feels compelled to continue, so he adds, “He’s a force of nature. Unpredictable. His existence is rage and violence that cannot, will not be contained. Whomever he chooses to follow wields Death, for however long he chooses to stay.”

“And you control him? Now?”

Hux huffs. “If you think anyone can control Kylo Ren, you are sorely mistaken.”

“Snoke controlled him,” she points out.

“Snoke manipulated him,” Hux argues. “There’s a difference.”

“... And now he follows you.” Organa finishes after a short silence.

Hux crosses his arms, scowling. “As do the entirety of the armed forces of the First Order. Your point?” 

Organa shakes her head, sitting back and pushing her hands under her thighs to keep them warm. “I’m not trying to start a fight, General Hux. I’m genuinely curious.” She looks at him thoughtfully. “You know, I thought you’d be older. The Old Empire would never have allowed someone so… young in your position.”

Hux considers the implications of her words, and decides to take them as a compliment. “I earned my rank. Perhaps if the Old Empire had given more freedom to the brilliant young minds in their academies instead of following their old traditions so stoically, they would have won the war.”

“Perhaps,” Leia concedes, “Although you’ll forgive me for being glad they were rather set in their ways.”

Hux inclines his head slightly, leaning back against the bulkhead to watch the streaking startrails outside the viewport. He takes a few deep breaths, hoping that, with Organa’s curiosity satisfied, the uncomfortable line of questioning and that infernal staring will finally stop.

Of course, it doesn’t. It’s quiet for only a short while before Organa says, “I was just wondering,” (Hux closes his eyes for a second, biting back a sigh), “how someone as young as yourself… How you find it in yourself to kill so many people. Genocide seems a heavy weight to bear for such narrow shoulders.”

Hux turns his head slowly to look at her. He isn’t even really sure where to begin. The implication that inexperience could have led to some kind of misguided resolve, that he isn’t fully aware of the consequences of his actions, or, almost worse, the veiled insult to his physique - he’s beginning to understand how Kylo came to be the way he is. 

He glances at the Stormtroopers seated around them surreptitiously, but they all appear to be suddenly absorbed in studying the minute details of the ceiling and/or floor, and none come to his assistance. And then he grimaces, because his father did  _ not _ raise him to seek assistance from Stormtroopers. He brought them along for backup in case of a physical assault. He does  _ not _ need them for a verbal assault. Even the kind that questions his humanity roughly two seconds after interrogating him on his… Kylo.

So he’s on his own. He considers what his answer should be for a few moments. He’s sure Organa is already intimately familiar with First Order propaganda and has no interest in hearing what a corrupt and inept government the New Republic was again.

Eventually, he settles on, “War has casualties, General. It’s one of the fundamental truths of conflict. This war has been going on for many, many years. Many lives have been lost. Many more than were sacrificed in the destruction of the Hosnian System.”

“Lives that  _ you _ sacrificed,” Organa interrupts. 

Hux ignores her. “If someone doesn’t put an end to the bloodshed, even more will die. Soldiers. Civilians. The lives of an entire star system will seem like nothing compared to the number of people who will be killed if someone doesn’t bring and end to this war.”

“So the ends justify the means? You pardon genocide in defense of victory?” She’s looking at him with a vaguely horrified expression. “Is that really what you believe?”

“I believe the deaths of the Hosnian people will put an end to the war that has torn the Galaxy apart for millennia, and herald a new era of peace and order never before seen in this universe.” 

And he does believe that. He truly does. He  _ has _ to.

“There were innocent people on those planets, General Hux,” Organa says, softly. “Children. Grandfathers and grandmothers who had nothing to do with the war.”

He clenches his fist and slams it on the seat next to him; the Stormtrooper sitting to his right jumps slightly. “They died so that future generations can live.”

“They  _ have _ no future generations,” Organa exclaims, hands slipping out from under her thighs to gesture widely.

“There are sacrifices to be made in any war, Organa,” Hux snaps. “They were…”  He stops himself just before the words ‘collateral damage’ can escape, swallowing heavily.

Organa seems to hear the words anyway, somehow, staring in shock before lowering her face into her hands and going deathly quiet. Hux shifts a bit awkwardly, looking away. He really doesn’t know why he expected his relationship with Kylo’s mother to start any differently.

The Stormtroopers in the shuttle are frozen in place, hardly daring to breathe. Even that infernal droid, nestled into a crook between the bulkheads and the pilot’s cabin and held in place by two hooking cables attached to the handholds in the doorway, is quiet, seeming to sense the uneasy atmosphere.

Eventually, Hux clears his throat softly and says, “Where will it end? When we’ve wiped each other out so thoroughly only space dust remains? Or do we allow one side to win and finally put an end to all the bloodshed? Under First Order rule the Galaxy can finally know peace.”

Organa lifts her head to look at him. “But at what cost?” Her stare bores into him. “I looked into my son’s eyes and I saw despair. I saw hopelessness and pain... A lost soul. Do you know what I see when I look into your eyes?”

Hux looks at her quietly, suspecting he will not like the answer.

She says, “No soul at all.”

Hux feels the hair on his arms rise and fights to keep still as a deep shiver runs down his spine. He’s locked eyes with Organa, hands gripping the nylon belts around his shoulders so tightly he can hear the leather of his gloves strain under the pressure.

Salvation comes in the form of the shuttle’s comms crackling to life in the pilot’s cabin. Finn, barely audible from where he’s strapped into the co-pilot’s seat next to Dameron, is requesting permission to dock with the Finalizer, giving the controller their landing codes and inputting the authorization cipher into the flight system.

The shuttle’s thrusters disengage with a shudder as the Finalizer’s tractor beam locks onto it, the gaping shadow of the ship’s docking bay swallowing them slowly. They’ve hardly set down, engines hissing and popping, before Hux is unbuckling his safety belts to get up, eager to get out of the suddenly oppressive air of the small hull. 

Organa is still staring at him.

Waiting impatiently for the landing ramp to make landfall, he’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel immensely relieved to be back on his ship, in familiar territory, where the officers might try to shoot you in the head, but at least don’t try to guilt trip you while doing so.

He crosses his hands behind his back and straightens up, bolstered by the familiar and cold recycled air that greets him, and marches briskly down the ramp, not waiting for Organa or the Stormtroopers or Finn and Dameron. Steam hisses in billowing clouds off recently-docked TIE-fighters, stacked in neat, diagonal rows up on the tall stands built into the hull. Far overhead, rows of sterile white lights cast barely-distorted silver reflections on black floors polished to shining. The soft static and comm-chatter of Stormtroopers’ comm units creates a fuzzy blanket of sound, muffling the echo of the sharp rap of their boots. Cargo shuttles hover close to the ground, loaded with the spare parts of hyperdrives and durasteel plating, and cleaning droids scuttle under and around and in between everything, chittering angrily at anyone that gets in their way.

Hux takes a deep breath, sighing it out slowly.  _ Home _ .

Still mostly filled with injured personnel from Starkiller, only a few gurneys and temporary emergency meditents have been cleared from the hangar, their patients having been cleared for duty, medivacced to proper medical facilities on nearby planets, or dead. This has made room for repair droids to pick up the remaining restorations to the damages on the Finalizer. They crawl like little insects over sensor arrays and wall consoles, the buzzing of their drills and drivers a constant hum in the background.

Phasma is waiting for him with a squadron of ‘troopers, rifles crooked loosely in their arms. Her helmet creates a distorted reflection of Hux’s face as he walks up to her. She thumps her chest in salute. “Welcome back, sir.”

Inclining his head, he turns to look back up the ramp, where Finn and Dameron flank Organa like bodyguards as she descends out of the shuttle. Behind them, BB-8 bustles through the legs of the Stormtroopers waiting to disembark before carefully and slowly trundling down behind them.

Hux has to make a conscious effort to stop his fingers twitching restlessly behind his back. When the party reaches the ground, he says, “Welcome aboard the Finalizer, General Organa.”

Organa is staring around the hangar with an awed expression. Finn and Dameron, staying behind her, both look equal amounts distrustful and worried.

“Do you like my ship?” Hux directs at Organa, because he can see Dameron eyeing the repair droids and doesn’t want to give him the opening to say something snide about the amount of havoc he’d wrought on the flight deck during his and Finn’s escape.

Organa manages to tear her eyes away from their surroundings long enough to glance at Hux. “I knew the First Order was being funded, but I never imagined…” She trails off as a cargo shuttle bearing an open container of blaster rifles drifts past, following it with her eyes. “We never stood a chance against you, with our old ships and dated weapons. Not really.”

Hux, who is almost embarrassingly relieved by the change in topic from their previous conversation, can’t help the swell of pride he feels for his ship, the first of the Resurgent class, featuring a significant amount of modifications he himself suggested. He waves his left hand in a gesture that encompasses the hangar and, by extension, the rest of the ship. “ Kuat-Entralla Engineering delivers what they’re paid for, and we paid a substantial amount for our flagship. She carries over a thousand turbolasers and ion cannons--” - he firmly ignores Finn’s muttered “minus a few ventral cannons”-- “thirteen full complements of TIE-fighters, and a crew of nearly eighty thousand. And now she’s at your disposal. Temporarily.”

“Flagship…” Organa murmurs. “The Finalizer is not the Order’s only Star Destroyer, then.”

“She’s the first of her kind,” Hux hedges. “There will be other Resurgent-class destroyers, eventually. Production has admittedly... slowed, due to the financial drain from the loss of our superweapon,” (he barely manages not to glare at Dameron), “but the Supreme Leader has several contingencies in place…” he trails off. “I suppose those are my contingencies, now.” 

“I thought Kylo Ren was the new Supreme Leader,” Finn speaks up, crossing his arms.

Hux gives him a look. “If I let Ren run the Order’s finances we’d have enough credits to power the Finalizer for roughly around a minute.”

Phasma’s shoulder pauldron clicks against the armor on her chest lightly as she turns to face Hux. “Sir, if I may. You’re absolutely sure we oughtn’t escort these…” There’s a moment in which she considers her wording. Eventually, she settles on “...people to the brig?”

“Under no circumstances,” Hux answers sharply. “They are our guests, as discussed, and I want you, as discussed, to see to the protection of General Organa personally.”

They’d had this conversation on the way to the Finalizer. Hux trusts Phasma understood his true meaning - that he’d like her to keep an eye on Organa while she’s aboard the ship.

Phasma salutes. “Understood, General Hux. Personally.”

He inclines his head, turning to lead their small party off the flight deck and into the hull of the Finalizer. “General Organa will stay in Ren’s quarters while aboard the ship.” He hopes the droids have finished their repairs to Kylo’s destroyed bunk. He doesn’t imagine she’d be entirely pleased to have to sleep on Kylo’s uncomfortable chair in the antechamber, watched over by the blackened husk of her dead father’s helmet.

Trailing after them, the little BB-unit rocks back and forth, emitting two beeps and a whistle that, when put together, sounds suspiciously almost like the pronunciation of its name. Hux has noticed it does this when it wants attention. Organa, Dameron and Finn all turn to look down at it. It makes a few more inquisitive-sounding beeps. 

Dameron nods in agreements. “Yeah, what about BB-8 and Finn and me?”

“Don’t worry,” Finn says, putting a hand on his shoulder, “I got you. I know my way around, remember?”

Phasma, bringing up the rear with her squadron of ‘troopers, chimes in with, “We’ve prepared guest quarters for you on the Officers’ deck. I assume you’d find that more… comfortable than the Stormtrooper barracks.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Finn says darkly, not sounding even a little thankful. “Let me guess, the privacy filters on the surveillance in those quarters just happen to be broken, right?”

“Some damage does appear to have been done to that part of the surveillance system,” Phasma agrees without missing a beat, stepping over a loose coil of cabling feeding emergency power to a wall console, “when one of our TIE-fighters made an unauthorized departure from the Finalizer a few weeks ago. It really is such a shame the repair droids haven’t gotten to that part of the ship yet.” She doesn’t sound even a little sorry.

The walk to Kylo’s quarters is longer than Hux would have liked, interrupted by a very awkward elevator ride, and several security protocols Hux has to bypass to allow Stormtroopers access to the Officers’ deck. When they finally stop in front of Kylo’s angular door, Hux finds himself perhaps more relieved than he should be to key in his override code, the door hissing open promptly.

Not a second passes before an orange and white blur streaks past his legs, nearly tripping him up. He twists around to follow it, cursing. Millicent bounds straight up to BB-8, twisting around it curiously, her tail wrapping around the rounded curve of its body. The droid tilts its head down to follow her with an alarmed beep, squirming slightly.

“Millicent, honestly,” Hux chides, taking a few short steps over and scooping her up in one arm, “What are you doing in there?”

Dameron smirks, hands coming to rest on his hips. “Maybe you should’ve sent the cat to find BB-8.  Would’ve been more effective than sending Kylo Ren.”

Hux fixes him with a withering look, but otherwise ignores the comment, declining to mention the fact that part of him doesn’t entirely disagree.

Cradling Millicent in one arm, he gestures for Organa to enter Kylo’s quarters. “Make yourself at home. Captain Phasma will be stationed outside, should you need anything.”

Organa inclines her head, squeezing Finn’s hand before going inside. The droid trundles after her, beeping loudly at the cat as it passes, and the door slides smoothly shut on both of them.

Hux is about to lead Finn and Dameron to their guest quarters when he’s interrupted by three soft tones over the ship’s intercom system, signalling the start of the routine, shipwide broadcast at the start of mid-shift. Phasma’s fist thumps her chest in salute, as do the Stormtroopers’. Finn starts to do the same, then seems to catch himself, slowly lowering his hand. Hux can see him almost physically reminding himself he doesn’t need to do this anymore.

It’s one of Hux’s older speeches, recorded during the construction of Starkiller Base. They’ve recycled these while they wait for new recordings to replace the ones erased during the coup. One of Hux’s personal favorites about the corruption of the New Republic, it goes into elaborate and lengthy detail about the bribery and nepotism higher-ranking members of the Senate had been infamous for before their downfall.

It’s extremely awkward for everyone involved. Finn shuffles slightly, looking everywhere but at Dameron. Dameron rolls his eyes, crossing his arms with a look of disgust.

Millicent, for her part, drapes over Hux’s arm like a limp coat with an idle expression, tail twitching lightly against his waist. She doesn’t care about corruption. She’s just a cat.

 

\---

 

To say Hux’s announcement about their cooperation with the Resistance, sent via a channel-wide broadcast to every corner of the First Order’s territories, was not received well, would be an understatement. In a matter of minutes, he’s received several strongly-worded text transmissions, a video call from a very irate Chevin admiral in the Quellii sector, and one holocall from a Pa’lowick woman he does not know who did not say anything, just pointed at him and made a slitting motion across her throat before cutting the feed.

He does his rounds on the Finalizer, ostensibly for a bout of random spot inspections, but really so he can gauge the feeling of his crew. Their temperaments are dispassionate and cold, their interactions bureaucratic, bordering on impersonal - or, to be accurate, even more so than usual. But his subordinate officers salute him promptly as he passes, and when he interrogates Mitaka on the matter, his only response is, “We trust you, sir. We’re with you, and with the Resistance, as long as necessary.”

And then Kylo calls him, and because it's Kylo, it only narrowly avoids becoming an intergalactic disaster.

It's well into the sixth cycle when he finally makes it back to his own quarters. Exhaustion is starting to creep up on him, and the wound in his shoulder, newly opened in their tousle with the Knights of Ren, throbs painfully as he shoulders off his coat, draping it over the back of the chair at his desk.

He slumps down in the chair tiredly, kicking his legs out in front of him and letting his arms drape down at his sides, head resting back onto the soft leather of the pillowed neck rest. Appearing as if from nowhere, Millicent hops up onto his lap, turning in circles a few times before making herself comfortable. It would appear he’s been deigned good enough again, with Kylo’s quarters suddenly filled with strangers. Little traitor. Scritching behind one ear lightly, Hux digs his personal comm device from the pocket of his jodhpurs. Unsurprisingly, there are no further messages from Kylo.

He suppresses a sigh. It's not as though he doesn't already have enough to deal with - a rendezvous with the Resistance “fleet” near D’Qar, new formation strategies for the combined forces of their X-Wing and TIE-fighter complements, and final repairs and reparations to the Finalizer’s weapons and shield system are all waiting for his signature. He can't afford any distractions right now - no matter how soft and deep Kylo’s voice sounded when he said--

No. Not going there right now. He sits up abruptly enough to startle Millicent, who jumps to the floor with a reproachful glare. Hux’s stomach growls, reminding him that he forgot to eat, again. But he's tired and his headache is back in full force, and there is no way he is going to go all the way to the officers’ mess at this hour. So he just strips to his tank and underwear, folding his uniform neatly and putting it in the hamper for the cleaning droids to take care of, before dropping onto his bed and closing his eyes.

The bunk is much more spacious without that slab of meat taking up three quarters of it. But, he’ll concede, the sheets are very cold under his hands as he spreads his arms to the side, goosebumps pebbling the skin up to his elbows. He turns onto his side, curling up. There's still two hours before the start of first shift. He’s tired and grumpy, still bothered by the echoes of his uncomfortable conversation with Organa, and wants to get some sleep while he still can.

So of course a very annoying siren starts blaring from the comms panel by his desk. His eyes fly open to the red flash of the alarm, and as he sits up to swing his legs over the side, Millicent dashes in under the bunk, hiding.

Muttering a string of curses under his breath, he stalks over to the desk and slams his palm on the commlink. “This had better be good.”

“Sir,” says a male voice reporting from the console on the port side of deck 33-c, “your presence has been requested in the personnel quarters. Room 35-c2.”

Hux blinks, 35-c…. Kylo’s room. He goes cold. This can’t be good.

He hurriedly pulls on his jodhpurs, stepping into his boots and tugging up the zips. The tunic gets thrown over his tank to hang open loosely as he sets off down the corridor at a run. He does up the zip and clips the belt around his waist as he goes, so that by the time he arrives he looks at least semi-decent.

The corridor outside Kylo’s quarters is crawling with Stormtroopers. The two nearest the entrance of the hallway spot Hux first, snapping into smart salutes promptly echoed down the corridor like dominoes as he clips past them, slowing to a jog. Near Kylo’s door, Phasma appears to be engaged in a shouting match with the Resistance pilot, enunciating every argument with a forward shove of the rifle she has pressed to the forehead of a bound and gagged Stormtrooper, huddled against the wall in foetal position. He flinches at every loud word, a bruise starting to form just above his right eyebrow under the tip of her blaster, and when she says, particularly loudly, “This is  _ not _ one of my men!” he squeezes his eyes shut tightly with a very soft whimper.

“What is going on here?” Hux demands as he comes to stand next to them, interrupting Dameron’s exasperated “He’s wearing  _ your _ armour!”.

“Sir,” Phasma inclines her head with a disgruntled expression, “There was an assassination attempt on General Organa.”

Hux presses his palm against his forehead. Of course there was a bloody assassination attempt on bloody Organa. He can’t even legitimately try to save the fucking galaxy without some controversialist trying to ruin his public image. He runs the hand back through his hair, sighing. “Has she been harmed?”

“No, sir,” Phasma says, at the same time as Dameron remarks, “No thanks to your security detail.”

“What I’d like to know,” says Finn, who is also, of course, here, because why would the ex-Stormtrooper be the only one not to witness this shamefully public display of disloyalty to the Order, “is how one of your officers gained access to Ren’s quarters.”

“As would I,” Hux answers, giving Phasma a pointed look that hopefully conveys exactly how long the conversation they are going to have about this later is going to be. She at least has the decency to lower her gaze and-- Hux blinks, then turns to peer at the bound and gagged ‘trooper on the ground. Finn had said “officer”... On closer inspection, he realizes he  _ has _ seen this man before, and not in Stormtrooper gear, but a black, high-collared uniform, rank insignia on his breast. What was his name…

When it doesn’t immediately come to mind, Hux shakes it off, stepping past Finn and Dameron and Phasma and into Kylo’s quarters. He’ll see to the traitor’s interrogation himself, much later, when this is over. Until then, he can become intimate friends with Kaplan and Rodinon, who will undoubtedly be delighted to welcome him to their temporary home in the brig.

Organa is sitting on the edge of Kylo’s bunk, a medical droid checking her over. BB-8 hovers nearby, anxiously rocking back and forth with a low-frequency vibration that sounds almost like a purr.

Hux dismisses the medical droid with a wave of his hand, coming to stand in front of Organa. “What happened?”

“I was asleep,” she says, softly, “Next thing I know someone is trying to smother me with one of Ben’s… one of these pillows… If it weren’t for BB-8…” She glances at the little droid, who swivels its head around to look up at her.

“The BB-unit. Saved your life.” Hux says skeptically, because there really isn’t any other way to say those particular words in that particular order. When BB-8 chirps at him cheekily, one panel flipping open to reveal its little shock prong, Hux takes a careful step back, with both hands raised in a gesture of peace. He’s seen what it can do with that thing.

Organa says, “He got the attacker off of me long enough for me to get to my blaster. But before I could use it, your Stormtrooper Captain was on him like an avalanche.”

Hux adds ‘assaulting the traitor physically instead of just shooting him in the back’ to the list of accusations he is preparing for the imminent disciplinary hearing of aforementioned Stormtrooper Captain. For now, he folds his hands behind his back and says, “I apologize for the inefficiency of my crew. You are my guest, and I promised you would not come to harm. I deeply regret that this has not been the case.”

“I’m fine, General Hux,” Organa waves it away.

“Regardless,” he continues, “I’ll see to it that your guard is doubled. This will not happen again, General Organa, I assure you.”

Organa looks at him quietly, the same way Kylo does sometimes, like she is seeing straight through him. It makes his skin crawl.

“The First Order is not quite the monolith of solidarity you’d like everyone to think it is, is it,” she says, more of a statement than a question, and one that strikes right at the heart of his doubts. Just like Kylo has a habit of doing. “You talk a big game about changing the Galaxy, when you can’t even make believers of your own people.”

Hux can feel a muscle twitch in his jaw. Behind his back, he allows his fists to clench. “There will always be those who rebel against change. But if there is one thing the First Order does not tolerate, it is individualism. There is no room in this organization for those who do not share our beliefs. The traitor will be dealt with. Efficiently.”

Turning on his heel, he marches out of Kylo’s bedroom without waiting for an answer. In the antechamber, Dameron has made himself comfortable on Kylo’s chair in front of Vader’s dias, one leg slung over the arm of the chair, his head resting on a makeshift pillow made from his jacket. At Hux’s raised eyebrow, he shrugs one shoulder and says “Ain’t moving from this spot. Any more of your evil minions gotta get through me.”

“They weren’t my--” Hux stops himself from playing into the taunt, shaking his head. “As you wish, Dameron.” He doesn’t add: “good luck getting any actual sleep with Darth Vader’s toasted ectoderm watching over you like the galaxy’s most depressing night light.”

Stepping out of Kylo’s quarters, he orders Phasma to the interrogation room near the officer’s mess, and a whole squadron of ‘troopers on a two-shift rotation outside Kylo’s door. With all the commotion, there’s so little time left before first shift that he might as well skip sleep altogether. So he detours to the mess on his way to talk to Phasma, getting a large mug of caf and, on revision, another one for later, because there is no way this is not going to be a long day.

Actually, he revises, even worse: with the amount of time they’re all going to have to spend together on the Finalizer, Hux’s very precarious grip on power over the Order, and the Deimos looming closer by the hour, he gets the feeling the worst of his long days is only just about to start.


	8. We arrive at the Deimos (lasers: charged, Force: channeled, cannons: out)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you missed it, Deimos now has a new “chapter”! This standalone slots in between chapters 3 and 4, taking place right before Hux and Kylo leave the Finalizer to meet with the Resistance for the first time. It’s really just an excuse for them to have sex, and isn’t important in terms of this story’s plot at all, buuuut if you’re into really bad cat puns and awkward chair-sex (I mean, who isn’t?), here it is: “[Put that cat back where it came from or so help me](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8723266)”
> 
>  
> 
> And now, back to our scheduled programming:

The Millennium Falcon hovers, stationary, in the cold and quiet dead of space. The deep and endless black stretching around them is broken only by the intermittent pinpricks of faraway stars, dim and shimmering, geometric and unfamiliar constellations illustrating an eloquent map of the unknown. It seems colder, here, somehow, quieter than where they're from. The silence seems to muffle sound even inside the cockpit of the Falcon, swallowing Kylo’s quiet sigh. 

They are very far from home.

The ship shudders slightly, a deep vibration Kylo feels right down to his bones, the overhead lights flickering ominously before phasing back to life. Kylo lies his palm on the console before him as if to console the ship; an old habit from countless journeys that stretched the Falcon to her limits and yet, saw her pull through. Fiddling with the transceiver controls, he focuses his gaze on the twinkling stars ahead, bright on one side but fading to black on their left, to avoid seeing what hovers right on the edge of his field of vision, monstrous and unyielding.

He'd tried looking at them. Turned his head to the left, forced his eyes to follow. But his mind could not comprehend the impossibility of their existence; shied away violently from the writhing mass of black dwarfing the lightyears between them. A glimpse of wrinkled membrane, a writhing mass of crawling, wet muscle, and he found himself suddenly staring at his hands, as if he'd always been looking at them, hadn't he? Or had there been something… 

The expanse of glimmering, cold stars before them is going dark, falling victim one by one to the unceasing hunger of the Deimos. Kylo tries turning his head in their direction again. His vision blurs, twinkling stars becoming smears of silver and nausea rolling over him like a wave, and when he can focus again he finds himself staring at the distant pinpoint of a blue star, not too far away from them and near the end of its natural life, its undulating spin unstable and violent.

The angular support beams of the viewport slice their view of space into neat, rounded sections. Overhead and to Kylo’s right, control panel lights blink red and green, indicating the functionality (or lack thereof) of the Falcon’s systems, nestled among countless square, unlabeled buttons, the purpose of all of which he's not even sure Han Solo knew. The dark console slopes toward Kylo’s lap, digging into his thighs where his long legs don't completely comfortably fit underneath it.

The tan leather of the pilot’s seat next to him creaks as XN-336 sits back, hands splayed carefully on his thighs. The white Stormtrooper helmet covering his face does little to mask his fear; it radiates off him, green and sickly-tasting to Kylo’s senses. He shifts restlessly, gaze tilted towards the right side of the viewport and away from  _ them _ , his surface thoughts a complicated tangle of  _ ‘shouldn't be here’ _ and  _ ‘Hux’s orders’ _ , but mostly just  _ ‘oh, fuck’ _ .

Behind them, Rey and Luke perch on the fold-down passenger seats pried from the wall of the cockpit. They'd talked on the journey here, on and off, but as the Falcon drew nearer the Deimos. Their conversation became less and less frequent, and finally stopped altogether, seemingly swallowed by the heavy silence of this part of space. Kylo glances back at them. Rey has grabbed hold of Luke’s hand, gaze fixed outside the circular viewport, and Luke is staring fixedly at the back of XN-336’s chair.

Kylo looks away, focusing on the array of buttons and levers in front of him instead. In the centre of the console, the hyperspace transceiver array display glows a happy orange with the coordinates of the Finalizer, streaking towards them at hyperspeed, the channel frequency, and a little flashing icon indicating an open connection. The other end of the holochannel, receiving video feed from the sensors mounted on the snout of the Falcon, is very quiet, the soft hiss of the long-range broadcast interrupted only by short crackles of static as the Falcon’s electrical systems waver. 

“Are you seeing this?” Kylo eventually asks in the direction of the transceiver, when the silence has become unbearable.

“... No?” is Hux’s tentative, tinny response, grey noise hissing over his ‘s’ as he continues, “Seeing what?”

Oh. Kylo reaches over to fiddle with the transceiver buttons, his gloves hampering his grasp slightly as he twists the frequency dial. “How about now?”

“No, Kylo,” says Hux. The commlink crackles, the ambient background noise of the Finalizer fading into a hiss before clearing again. Overhead, the lights shimmer slightly, dimming, but not completely cutting out.

Kylo frowns, checking the settings again. It should be working. Unless... “Did you turn the video feed on?”

“Of course it’s on,” Hux’s voice snaps, sounding annoyed, “You’re not broadcasting on the right frequency.”

“This is the only long-range frequency,” Kylo retorts, voice rising as his hackles go up at Hux’s tone. “Maybe your ship needs better transceivers.”

“The only thing my ship needs,” Hux bites out, “is a competent reconnaissance partner.” His voice fades into static again, only the tail-end of the barked “... wrong with this commlink?” coming through.

Next to Kylo, XN-336 shakes his head, fiddling with some of the dials to his left. “We seem to be experiencing some kind of electrical malfunction, General Hux. It appears to be--” he pauses when the lights flicker again, the entire ship shuddering slightly and a red emergency light starting to flash in the panel above Rey’s head, “--affecting all systems.” 

Rey mutters, “That’s what we get for bringing this rusted heap of scrap-metal.” 

Kylo twists back to glare at her with a protesting “Hey!”: memories of Han Solo proudly showing him how fast the Falcon could move, how smoothly she broke atmo, the bank-and-shift maneuver he was adamant no other ship in the galaxy could pull off; remnants of his old life slot together into a kind of patchwork possessiveness of the Falcon, making his hackles rise at the insult, no matter how true Rey’s statement may be. No one gets to insult this ship but him.

The comms fizzle again, and he can almost hear Hux pinch the bridge of his nose with a short, annoyed sigh. “Look, just describe them to us. We’ll see them for ourselves when we get there.”

Kylo growls and crosses his arms, sitting back in the co-pilot’s chair. Reluctantly, he looks back up and out the viewport, forcing himself to focus on the sight in front of him when his eyes threaten to slide away.

And there they are. The Deimos. More vast than can comfortably fit his understanding; lightyears of pockmarked membrane, blacker than the deepest, most secret parts of space. A mass of immense, slowly curling and twisting tentacles, encrusted with the remains of dead planets, stuck together here and there and treacling with rot. One creature, or a mass of creatures; an absurd, eyeless conglomeration of maybe-flesh culminating in a massive, gaping mouth, filled with impossibly many teeth. 

Kylo’s mind blanches, and he has to look away from them or risk losing himself to the madness of their reality, to the low, droning sound pressing in on the very edge of hearing with an almost physical weight, to the whispers and soft scratches emanating from outside the Falcon, or perhaps inside of it.

Swallowing heavily, mouth gone dry, he has to try to speak twice before his voice finally starts working again. “They are… vessels of cosmic decay.” 

He forces his eyes back up again, clenching his hands into fists on his thighs. “Their skin is the blackest black that surrounds you in your deepest, unwaking dreams. They have… limbs, like tentacles, stretching out in front of them, reaching out and curling around stars, around planets, hauling them into a cavity filled with more teeth than should physically be able to fit.” He finds himself suddenly staring at the curving durasteel support frame of the Falcon’s viewport, at the happy blinking lights embedded into the panels overhead. A shaky, low exhale - what was he thinking about again? A few deep, steadying breaths; his head is pounding, a searing kind of pain just under his temples.

“Kylo?” Hux prompts, but Kylo has lost his words, temporarily swallowed into the absence of sound surrounding the Deimos.

Behind him, Luke continues, “We can feel them in the Force, too. Or rather, the absence of them in the Force. Massive holes of… nothing… where life, where energy should be. It’s as if the Force just… ends. I’ve never felt anything like it. Never imagined something like this could even be possible.”

Kylo has sensed this, too; the current of the Force, a massive river flowing through and connecting all things in the universe. But here, near the Deimos, the current seems to grow stronger, faster, like a river surging towards a waterfall, inexorably sucked into the massive vacuum created by the creatures before finally and irreversibly just… ceasing.

Voice soft and shaking only slightly, Rey adds, “There’s this kind of… purple fire. Well, not fire, exactly. More like mist, or a haze, rising like steam from their skin. Like a halo of light around them, outlining the negative space of their shapes...”

She trails off into silence, and none of them are looking at the Deimos now. There is a very long silence on the other end of the hyperspace transceiver before Hux clears his throat lightly. When he says, “That sounds delightful,”, the fear in his voice is so well masked Kylo thinks he only recognizes it because he knows him so well.

The next voice to come over the channel belongs to Leia, her fear much more plainly obvious. “Luke. Is this a fight we can win?”

Kylo doesn’t turn to look at Luke, but feels his presence behind him, the slight indent of the cushioned support behind Kylo’s head when Luke’s robotic hand clutches onto it. Luke says, softly, “We have to, Leia. For all our sakes.”

Kylo looks down at where his hands rest on his thighs, forcing his clenched fists to relax. He’ll admit to having felt genuine fear upon several occasions in his life: hearing Snoke’s voice for the first time; the look in Hux’s eyes before firing the Starkiller; feeling Rey in his mind suddenly when he was so sure he had the upper hand, and losing his duel with her in the snow - actually, just Rey in general; but he’s never been quite this acutely terrified, the kind of cold-sweat fear of something lurking just behind you in the dark, that spider-crawl up your spine screaming ‘ _ run, now! _ ’

Then Hux’s voice is back again. “We’ve rallied as much of this army as we’re going to get, and--” (static fizzles over part of his sentence) “-- nearly at your location. You’re to hold your position until we can rendezvous with the Millennium Falcon.”

“Sir,” XN-336 affirms from the pilot’s seat, reaching above his head to start the sequence to disengage the Falcon’s main thrusters.

“And Kylo?” Kylo blinks at the transceiver panel at the sound of his name. There’s a short, hesitative silence, before Hux finishes, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Kylo senses he wanted to say something else instead (not through the Force, but because Hux and sentimentality get along about as well as opposing magnets). With a frown, he reaches over and disengages the channel, the panel going dark. Using the back of the pilot’s seat, he levers himself up, clambering through the two chairs and squeezing past Luke and Rey. The familiar angles and old smells of the cockpit press against his senses with the urgency of a forgotten past. He remembers the ship being a lot bigger, or perhaps he was just a lot smaller back then - little Ben, folded up in the passenger seat behind Chewie, watching his father fiddle with dials and levers and buttons, muttering into an earpiece, “We’ll be back before dinner. Promise.”

He ducks out of the cockpit, stomping down the short, curving corridor to the common area in annoyance, as if he can stomp out the persistent memories he has neither the time, nor inclination to deal with right now. He throws himself down on the hard seat of the uncomfortable, round couch behind the dejarik table, avoiding by memory the thick, sectioned cables jutting out of the wall overhead (“Just temporary,” Han had always said, “until I get the plasto-panels replaced.”)

Dejarik game disks, stacked in little towers in the storage space built into the side of the table, shudder and topple over as he slumps over onto the table tiredly, resting his forehead on his arms. Kylo never lost a game at this table, not to Han, not to Chewie, not to Lor San Tekka, who was famous for his skill at it. He leaves the table off, now, a dead relic from a past he is desperately trying not to let interfere with the present mission.

To his annoyance, he’s not alone: Luke follows him, squeezing in on the rounded bench next to him, his new girth, a sign of a peaceful life, giving him a bit of trouble.

“These seats are just as hard as I remember,” he mutters, his robes whispering as he arranges himself more comfortably, “No matter where you sit, something’s always digging into your back.”

Kylo doesn’t answer, letting the cold of the table’s surface seep into his forearms. There is a very long, awkward silence, in which Luke fiddles with one of the game disks, turning it around and around in his cybernetic fingers. Kylo can’t get a reading off him at all, not in the Force, and neither through what he remembers of him - doesn’t know why he’s here or what he wants to say, but he’s sure it won’t be anything good. The stretching silence puts him on edge, and try as hard as he might, he can’t stop his milling thoughts. He’s not sure why, but he feels like Luke might be gearing up for a confrontation - about killing Han, maybe, or the padawans at Luke’s school, or Tekka or any of the hundreds of other lives Kylo’s taken. He sits up, glancing at the old man out the corner of his eye. Luke is frowning slightly, lips pursed. That definitely looks like he wants to be confrontational.

Kylo tries not to glare. Tries to will him to go away, even tries using the Force to push at him lightly - which is, of course, completely ineffectual. He’s made himself so anxious about what his uncle is going to say to him that, when Luke does finally start speaking, he finds his hand twitching towards his lightsaber before he can stop himself.

Luke puts the game disk down and folds his hands on the table, cybernetic joints curling into the creases of his human hand. His eyes are distant. “When I was a boy on Tatooine…” He trails off, sighs. “When I was a boy, my eyes were filled with stars. I wanted nothing more than to go up there, escape what I thought was the dreary life of a farm boy. ‘Big dreams’, my aunt used to say. ‘Big dreams cast thick shadows’. Back then, I wasn’t a Jedi. I wasn’t anything. Just a stupid boy, dreaming of adventure…” He goes quiet  again, staring in front of him but seeing the past.

Kylo isn’t sure what to say, or if he should say anything at all. He’s slouching over the table slightly, his hands curled into tight fists on his thighs and wishing more than anything that Luke would just leave him alone with his headache. When he glances up from the table’s darkened blue grid, it’s straight into the clear blue of Luke’s eyes. The overhead lights shudder, dimming, and somewhere deeper inside the ship, something snaps and starts to hiss.

Luke says, “You were right, you know. I do run. I’ve always run.” 

Kylo blinks. That’s… not what he’d been expecting. Luke reaches out to put his human hand on Kylo’s shoulder, and it’s only with great effort that he stops himself from flinching away. 

Luke continues, “Not very good at it, though. The things I run from have a tendency to catch up.”

Kylo tears his gaze away from him, training his eyes on the mess of toolboxes and emergency lead piping and welding gear stacked into a haphazard pile against the opposite wall. Trying to keep any kind of emotion out of his voice, he says, “And here I am. Your biggest failure. Couldn’t run from me either, could you?”

“I never should have tried,” is Luke’s weary response.  

Kylo turns to look at him again, searching his eyes when he still can’t get a reading off him in the Force.

“I blame myself for Han,” Luke continues, and he sounds old now beyond his years, “For everything. If I had just seen Snoke in you sooner--”

Kylo surges up out of his seat fast enough that his thighs slam into the table, dejarik disks skidding over the edge of their container and toppling to the floor. “Killing Han Solo was my choice,” he bites out acidically. “ _ I _ did that.  _ I _ chose Snoke. I chose the Dark Side.” He feels the Force rising in him steadily, like liquid agitated by his anger and bubbling just below the surface, stinging the back of his throat. “I did everything Grandfather would have wanted. You don’t get to take that from me.”

Luke is staring at him in something akin to shock, one hand still hovering in the air where it had rested on Kylo’s shoulder. When seconds have ticked by with Kylo looming over him, fists clenched at his side and breathing heavily, his scar aching where his face has twisted into a scowl, Luke finds his voice enough to murmur, shakily, “Oh, Ben... Vader wouldn’t have wanted this.” He shakes his head. “Not this...”

“This is everything Vader wanted,” Kylo argues, voice rising, gesturing sharply with one gloved hand. He’s still standing, trapped between the bench and the dejarik table, its edge biting into his thighs. “I’ve destroyed my weakness and reforged myself in the fires of rage and purpose. And it has made me so much more powerful than you could ever imagine.”

“Vader repented, Ben,” Luke contends, his own voice loud now. He stands slowly, resting his fingertips on the surface of the table. “He chose the Light, before he died.” 

“No,” Kylo shakes his head.

“He killed the Emperor and saved my life. He sacrificed himself for me.”

“No,” Kylo finds himself retreating a step back at Luke’s words, still shaking his head. “That’s not how...”

Luke takes a step toward him, closing the gap between them and reaching out. “Ben… he chose the Light.”

Kylo stares at him, something akin to horror chewing at the back of his mind. There is no way it can be true. No way. His hands are shaking with the shock of being doused in ice, his whole world threatening to crumble around him. Luke is lying. He must be lying. But… there’s something in the old man’s eyes, in the way he is looking at Kylo, with pity and with remorse...

And he suddenly feels like he’s falling, profound and visceral disbelief swallowing him into a very deep, very dark abyss. The foundation of everything he’s built his life on is disintegrating right beneath his feet, leaving him tumbling in a dangerous freefall. Rage crawls like bile into the back of his throat, at everything he’s done for Snoke, for the Dark Side, in the name of the grandfather he so admired when Vader himself had turned to the Light. Kylo allowed himself to become a monster and for what? 

The rage is so big now that he shakes with it; it leaks from his very pores and into the bones of the Falcon, making them groan in protest as the entire ship starts to shake. Luke is saying something but he can’t hear him past the rushing in his ears, seething with betrayal.

Before he knows exactly what he’s doing, his lightsaber is in his hand, spitting and crackling angrily. With a deep growl he flings one hand out. The dejarik table shudders, then tears from the floor with a shriek of complaining bolts, the Force smashing it into the opposite wall. Tools and dejarik disks and rolls of tape scatter over the floor. Kylo lashes out wildly, losing himself to the old, familiar feeling of his rage. He lets go because he can’t hold on, because trying to control it would tear him apart. He can’t even see what he’s destroying, doesn’t know and honestly, doesn’t care. All he can think about is tearing this ship, this place that belongs to a past he’s destroyed and now, has been destroyed by, apart. The Force crackles around him, masking his incoherent yelling.

And then Luke’s hand appears beside him, fingers touching his temple lightly. And everything goes dark.

 

\----

 

He gasps awake, later, to the dark and the disorientating smell of must and a pounding headache. Bolting upright, his head slams into an unforgiving metal beam right overhead. Pressing a hand against his head with a wince and a muttered curse, he leans up on one elbow to peer into the surrounding darkness. He is somehow in what accounts for the Falcon’s bunk - one of four coffin-sized depressions in the hull of the ship, originally meant as storage lockers, which Han had converted (if ‘converted’ is the right word to use to describe the thin mattresses and mismatched pillows haphazardly stuffed into the holes) into beds. The musty smell emanates from the blankets, which he doubts have been washed since… well, ever.

Slowly, he starts to piece things together: Luke must have used the Force to put him to sleep when he lost control. And he lost control because… He buries his face in his hands. He knows what Luke told him is true. The Force echoes with it, now that he is calm enough to hear it clearly, rings with the sound of Vader’s true name, shining in the Light, and whispers questions he is not yet ready to face:  _ who are you, now that everything you’ve ever believed has been proven wrong? Where will you go when even the Darkness can’t-- _

He pauses. He’s being watched. 

Tilting his head slightly to peer through the gaps in his fingers, he makes out a pair of greyish boots, standing right next to the bunk. They appear to be attached to slender legs and a tan-wrapped torso, which leads to the smug face of Rey, looking entirely too pleased with herself from where she smiles at him over crossed arms.

Behind her, Luke leans in the doorway, silhouetted by the disc of light that is the circular corridor behind him, hands pressed into the pockets of his cloak. 

Kylo looks away. Absurdly, the first thing that occurs to him is that he wishes Hux were here.

Head still throbbing, he swings his legs over the side of the bunk, curled over himself so as not to collide with the low ceiling again.

“Luke put you to sleep,” says Rey, almost smiling. She’s still shielding herself in the Force, but a bit of her smugness leaks out, coloring her voice. “You might be familiar with the technique.” In lieu of mentioning any kind of wheel or the turning thereof, she continues, “You were having some kind of, I dunno, episode.”

Kylo glares at Luke. Luke stares back coldly, his expression unreadable.

When Kylo doesn’t respond, Rey rolls her eyes a little: “Anyway, your mum and your evil boyfriend are here. It’s time to go.” 

“He’s not my evil--” Kylo starts, but Rey is already gone, her steps light and soft as she slips past Luke and into the light of the corridor, disappearing.

And because Luke hasn’t stopped looking at him, despite Kylo’s best attempts at emulating Hux’s most derisive glare, he snaps, “What?”

Luke straightens with a soft sigh, slipping his hands out of his pockets to clasp them together over his stomach. “You’re more broken than I thought possible… Ben, I’m sorry. I don’t know if you can be fixed.”

Kylo levers himself up. His lightsaber clatters to the floor; someone had lain it next to him on the bunk. Using the Force, he calls it to him and clips it to his belt as he straightens up. At first, he intends to shove past Luke, but stops in front of him instead, changing his mind. He may be broken and left without the past he thought he’d known, but he is still Kylo Ren, still the Supreme Leader of the First Order, and if nothing else he still has Hux, who believes in who he’s become, not where he came from. “Your failure made me strong, old man,” he growls at Luke, “more powerful than you can imagine. Let’s just do what we came for. I’ll show you how little I need your fixing.”

He shoves past his uncle, jostling him perhaps a little harder than intended - he’d been a lot smaller the last time he’d spent this much time around his old teacher, his fits a lot less violent. His boots clang on the metal grid floor as he stomps down the corridor and into the common area, and stops short: the room is in shambles. What remains of the dejarik table lies, gently smoking, in the center of the floor. Steaming pipes and sparking, severed cables hang in tangles from deep, open gashes splitting the walls like wounds, and the only thing that identifies the mangled, smoking pile of warped metal and shredded leather as the couch is the fact that part of it still remains bolted to the floor. 

Kylo winces. If Han were alive, he’d have absolutely murdered him for this.

He clambers over and maneuvers around the rubble and debris as best he can, snaking around the sharply-smelling burnt leather of the ex-couch and ducking into the circular doorway of the opposite corridor, heading to the cockpit. There, he finds Rey seated in the co-pilot’s seat next to XN-336, both of them flipping switches and adjusting the ship’s controls like they belong there. It makes Kylo seethe.

Pressing one hand against the doorway of the cockpit, he leans down slightly to look through the viewport. To the right of the Falcon (his eyes slide away from the sweeping curl of a tentacle just drifting into view) hovers the Finalizer, brightly lit by the shimmering pulses of a dying star, devoured by the ever-approaching, ever-ravenous Deimos. Hux’s star destroyer is surrounded by a cloud of TIE-fighters and X-wings, swarming like gnats around a nest and glistening in the starlight. Somewhere in that nest is Hux, controlling the swarm with curt commands and sharp gestures. Kylo imagines he can feel his energy in the Force, all the way from here; his unique mix of gleaming brilliance and cutting derision shining brighter than all the little spots of life energy of the Finalizer crew and Resistance fleet combined.

The star destroyer perches at an angle to the Falcon, directly in the wake of the approaching Deimos, like a desert-wasp queen and its drones facing off against a rathtar - if rathtars were the size of the Death Star. The absurd comparison is too accurate to be amusing, and it makes him frown. 

Rey’s soft voice draws his attention back to the cockpit. She’s turned slightly towards XN-336 and is saying, “You know, like how ‘Eff En’ became ‘Finn’. I think ‘Shen’ would suit you.” Amusement colors her voice slightly.

“I think it would be ‘Zen’, though, if you’re using Basic,” 336 answers, his energy slightly embarrassed, “But I’m quite okay with my designation, thank you. Respectfully.”

Outside the viewport, the thousand little pinpricks of light lining the sides of the Finalizer - viewports and control towers and sensor arrays - flicker at random, darkness sweeping over the ship like a shallow wave before her power stabilizes again. The Falcon’s cockpit lights dim at the same time, the ship convulsing with a deep, groaning shudder that forces Kylo to brace himself against the wall. 

Rey is pouting lightly, watching the Stormtrooper with a small frown. “Are you sure? Names are important.”

“I’m sure, thank you. I happen to like being a Stormtrooper.”

Rey looks at him thoughtfully, then turns back to the viewport with that same expression. Kylo wonders what she thinks of this - if it had occurred to her that some Stormtroopers might not be completely miserable in the Order. 

He clears his throat lightly to make his presence known, though of course, Rey would have felt him lurking in the back. XN-336 inclines his head at him, but Rey doesn’t even look back when he sinks down in the pull-down seat behind her, tucking one leg under himself by force of habit from his time spent in this seat as a boy. The chair is significantly smaller than it used to be (or perhaps he’s significantly larger than he used to be), and it takes some less-than-comfortable shifting around, but he eventually fits himself into it, pressing back into the headrest and closing his eyes. He lets himself drift on the soft, deep hum of the Falcons reactors, the clicks and soft beeps of control switches and bursts of static from the open, inactive comm link with the Finalizer. It seems less quiet now, with the life force of the Finalizer and Resistance troops nearby, a steady murmur of emotion, fear and hope and despair (but mostly fear).

The soft rustle of robes and familiar smell of Tatooine desert sage, somehow unchanged after all these years, belies Luke’s presence as he sits down next to Kylo in the other pull-down seat. As if summoned by his presence, the comm link crackles to life, hissing static over Mitaka’s voice: “Falcon, we’re in position. All sector screens are in formation, plasma cannons charged and on standby. Secondary artillery on standby. Waiting for your orders, sir.”

“Falcon,” Hux’s voice comes over the comm next. Kylo’s eyes open, finding the Finalizer again. “First formation is ready to launch. We await your signal.”

Next, Leia adds, “Rey, Luke,” and, softer, “Ben. Start channeling the Force away from the creatures now.”

Kylo takes a deep breath, not feeling the least bit ready for what they are about to attempt, but closes his eyes with a frown anyway and exhales, reaching out with his senses. He’s almost surprised by how quickly he feels Luke and Rey. They’re not shielding anymore, and with their emotions open like this he can suddenly feel every bit of Luke’s disappointment and regret, all of Rey’s worry and the surprising strength of her rage, just under the surface like a river of fire.

Connecting with Luke is easy - instinctual memory kicks in, his power eager to join with that of his old teacher, though the tinge of the Dark Side overlaying his connection with the Force shies away from the purity surging through Luke’s energy. He can feel Luke reaching out to Rey, bringing them into their connection, and when she links with them Kylo has to suppress a gasp - her power is like a tiny sun, unbridled and enormous, too bright to look at directly. Kylo’s eyes snap open, looking at her in awe. He’d known she was powerful, sensed it when he touched her mind on Starkiller Base, what seems like an eternity ago now. But he could have never imagined…

Rey has her eyes closed, turned slightly back towards them in her seat, unaware of or unaffected by Kylo’s shock. Luke’s power touches against Kylo lightly, gently goading him back to the task at hand. There is a brief battle of wills between them over control of the connection. Of all of them, Kylo wants to argue, he has the most experience with using the Force in battle. He’s spent his entire adult life honing his power for the sole purpose of killing, a weapon more deadly than any laser blaster or lightsaber. 

But of course, Luke has other ideas. He surges over Kylo like a wave, unyielding, and again instinct kicks in, the padawan’s will submitting to that of his old master. Kylo snarls aloud as command of his power is wrestled from him, grudgingly surrendering to Luke’s control. 

The world around him falls away, sucked into the gently warm and deeply quiet darkness of meditation in which only the three of them exist. The crackle of the comm link blurs into a echoey kind of white noise, the steadily-blinking red emergency lights smearing long trails along the edges of the vision.

Luke grasps his power and Rey’s, channeling both into his own well of the Force, and they slip into place with an almost magnetic snap, three anchors in a swirling current of power connecting them in an ever-expanding circuit. He’s in their heads, directing the flow of their power, and he doesn’t use words but they can hear his voice anyway, clear and sounding much younger than in reality. He steers the current of their power towards the Force-river being channeled into and devoured by the Deimos, and the moment they touch it, it threatens to overwhelm them, suck them into the faster-growing current of the Force like tiny boats being inexorably drawn toward the plunge of a very steep waterfall.

Kylo immediately has to fight just not to get swept up in it, dragged helplessly into the maws of death waiting at the end of the river. He braces himself against it, stablizing his presence against that of Luke and Rey in the Force. He finds himself suddenly glad to be connected to them - they are like boulders in the river, solid and steady presences for him to anchor himself to. 

Luke’s not-voice directs their combined will forward, forcing it into the powerful current and down through it like a knife. There they solidify themselves, strengthening their connection to each other into an almost physical presence within the Force, and as it grows, the Force river slowly starts to part around it. A bead of sweat trickles down Kylo’s temple. They concentrate their combined will on the point just before the Force river disappears into the Deimos, and when Luke’s not-voice wills them to  _ push _ , Kylo puts all of his strength behind it, driving his will into that singular point and driving it outwards.

And slowly, very slowly and with excruciating effort, the Force-river starts to split. It widens around them, bending outwards before finally tearing apart, branching into two streams, like water dividing around a rock, and then splitting into estuaries, away from the Deimos. And they are not happy about it. Their ever-present droning, deep enough to resonate right down to the bone, rises to a roar, penetrating through even the deep mist of meditation and drowning out everything else. Kylo doesn’t need to see them; he can feel the slow undulation of their tentacles become frantic, whipping and lashing deep swaths through what little of the Force remains in front of them, swallowing it down with renewed effort.

And in the endless black Kylo finds himself in, he, Luke and Rey are three tiny pinpricks of light, like fireflies trying to direct the flow of an ocean. His head pounds and he is no longer completely aware of his physical body; can’t see or hear or taste or breathe. He feels only the pull of the Force, dragging them all inexorably in. They have to redouble their efforts in pushing it away from the Deimos, shove the entirety of their unified being into changing the direction of the flow, but the harder they push, the harder it thrusts back against them. They slip backwards, sliding away from the Deimos, and surge forward, a slow and dangerous dance across the dark starfield.

Kylo is gripping the edge of his seat hard enough to make his knuckles ache. With a growl, he relents, lifting both hands, palms out, to channel his focus. He senses Luke doing the same with his human hand and digs in, physically leaning forward as he strains with all his might against the Deimos. 

And slowly, impossibly, it starts to work. When he manages to pry his eyes open, vision blurred and black spots dancing in front of him, he can vaguely make out the purple haze surrounding the Deimos - it’s dimmer now, nothing more than the faintest smudge of colour outlining their black skin. In front of him, Rey makes a soft sound. Kylo can feel her pain in their link, matching his own. The doubled effort of holding their ground against the pull of the Deimos and simultaneously pushing the Force away from them is more difficult than anything he’s ever attempted, and he’s so consumed by this undertaking that there’s barely any room to think or feel anything himself, much less try and console Rey.

Her shape blurs as his vision fades a bit, a wave of vertigo overtaking him, but he can see her visibly shaking, so he reaches forward and grabs her hand. The physical connection is surprisingly effective; it stabilizes them both a bit, settling the nausea in his stomach a little and clearing his vision enough to see that the purple haze has dimmed to barely more than a halo, now, and the undulating of the massive tentacles has slowed, many of them just drifting lifelessly in space.

Past the rushing in his ears he can barely make out Luke’s voice. He sounds strained, his voice thin, the words gasped out: “It’s working. Leia… now...” 

And then all hell breaks loose.

Kylo can barely understand the battle via Hux’s sharp commands over the comm link, partially and sometimes completely drowned out by the rushing in his ears. The first formation, a mix of TIE-fighters and X-wings led by one of Phasma’s best pilots, swoops in with a volley of laser cannons and projectile missiles and bombs, and the Deimos recoil, a kind of slow flinch on a galactic scale, tentacles twisting around each other and the huge mouth opening and closing in alarm (“ _ squadrons three and four,” Hux barks over the comms, “flank Red Teams five and seven, go high _ ”). Two formations break off and swoop into a high curve, raining fire like a small meteor shower in a line down to one tentacle. In alarm, the Deimos start to increase their pull on the Force, trying to wrap it around them like a shield. Kylo grits his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut with a growl ( _ someone says,  _ “ _ we’ve lost squadrons eight through seventy-four _ ”).

Time seems to drag to a stop, everything fading to nothing around him. Kylo becomes the push and pull of the vast Force river, dissolving into its massive current. Outside the Falcon, space is alive with the sound of explosions and laser fire, and at one point a white beam of light, bright enough to sear right through his closed eyelids, surges past with the loud scream of a plasma laser (“ _ this isn’t working,” says a voice in the darkness, “our fire is ineffective”, and, fearfully, “they’re shielding somehow; we need to fall back _ ”). 

He isn’t sure how long he can hold on; feels like parts of him are crumbling away into the river. He can no longer feel Rey or Luke; his sole purpose is to keep the Force away from the whirlpool that awaits at the end of the river. With great effort he manages to open his eyes enough to see a massive tentacle sweep past within mere kilometres of the Finalizer, clearing a broad swath through the TIE-fighters still surrounding her ( _ “sir, we must fall back,” echoes Phasma’s voice, and his mother again, sounding wavery and far-off now: “general, please, sound the retreat.” _ )  

In the background, he imagines he can hear Mitaka pleading with Hux to retreat, that they’ve lost too much of the fleet already, the plasma charges are depleted, please sir, we need to fall back ( _ a resounding  _ “ _ no,”, sharp, angry, and “volley the ventral cannons, give it everything she’s got,” and “we can still win this _ ”).

It absently occurs to Kylo that Hux has started sounding desperate. But that can’t be right. They’ve followed Hux’s plan to the letter, done everything he said. Hux’s plans never fail. He must be hearing wrong. (Over the comm, tiny and far away, Hux orders someone to route power from the ion drives to the cannons. A voice Kylo doesn’t recognize calls him mad. He thinks Hux probably won’t have liked that at all).

Then Leia’s voice crackles tinny and urgent over the comm link: “General Hux, please. We must fall back. We’ve lost too many. Let’s regroup and rethink our strategy for a second attack, while we still have a fleet left to attack with.”

There is a long silence, during which Kylo senses three TIE-fighters and an X-wing meet their untimely end against the lashing whip of a tentacle, explosions flashing in bursts of light behind Kylo’s closed eyes before being swallowed by the vacuum of space. Hux’s sigh, when he finally concedes, sounds resigned and tired, even over the link. “Fine,” he says tiredly, “Alright. Call back all squadrons, retreat formation.”

In the background, Kylo hears Mitaka give the order. Still trying to orient himself in the haze of the Force, he isn’t quite sure why they’re retreating. He’s confused until he pries his eyes open again, looking out the viewport. His vision is still blurred, but as it slowly clears, he goes cold: the Deimos remain exactly as they were, vast and incomprehensible, with no visible sign that they’ve been attacked at all, tentacles slowly twitching to and fro before them. 

But the swarming cloud of TIE-fighters and X-wings around the Finalizer has been decimated. Even with the remaining wounded fighters still limping into the dotted formations clinging to the orbit of the star destroyer like flies, the loss they’ve suffered is staggering. The Finalizer’s cannons are depleted and smoking, more than half of the little white squares of her viewports dark and cold. 

They’re too far away to be able to discern any details, such as the color of the X-wings returning to their stations. Kylo wonders if Poe Dameron survived, and too late remembers that he’s still connected to Rey in the Force link - the moment the thought occurs to him he feels it reverb off her, fear and sickening worry echoing through the link. Her hand convulses around Kylo’s, fingernails digging into his palm.

Inside their heads, Luke’s not-voice says, “We failed.” The link is colored by his exhaustion and despair, and Rey’s worry, and Kylo’s disbelief. Luke’s not-voice says, “It’s over. Let go.”

Kylo blinks a few times, starting to protest although he’s not sure why - some part of him is too deeply rooted in meditation, in directing the Force, and he’s still confused as to how it could be possible Hux’s plan didn’t work. Surely if they just try a little longer, they can overcome this. But Luke severs his connection to them suddenly, and in their weakened states, Kylo and Rey can’t hold the Force river by themselves. It crashes in around them and Kylo has to let go, pull back into himself or risk getting drowned under it. Retreating back into his own head with a wince, he catches just a glimpse of the Deimos, their inexorable and inextinguishable hunger hauling the Force river back towards them, the steady stream resuming into that impossible mouth.

Gasping for breath, he lets his head thud back against the headrest, every muscle in his body aching and exhausted. He can no longer properly tell whether his eyes are open or closed, his arms dangling loosely at his sides. He’s been tired to the point of exhaustion many times before, but for the first time in his life, he thinks there’s a very real chance he might actually black out.  (By the way Rey’s head is lolling onto her shoulder, he thinks she already has - and, oh. Eyes open, then.)

By the clicking of the Falcon’s controls and rising hum of her engines, Kylo vaguely understands that XN-336 is flying them into a safer position, some lightyears away from the Deimos. With the absence of any kind of energy to try and get a read off his emotions, Kylo wonders absently what he thinks of all this; whether he’s disappointed that they lost the battle or merely relieved that they survived. He can’t feel anything at all through the Force, his senses completely numb.

As the Falcon rises and tilts into a steep curve, the last thing Kylo sees is the Deimos, their maddening size and light-consuming hides, the purple haze around their tentacles burning more brightly than before, as if mocking their failure. He catches a glimpse of the Finalizer, banking into a slow turn for her retreat, docking bays swarming with the insect-like shapes of X-wings and TIE-fighters, ion engines glowing brightly-blurring trails in her wake. He's dimly aware of Rey’s hand, still limply curled around his own.

And then exhaustion claims him, blackness overcoming him and dragging him deep into a dream of shifting sand dunes, shimmering bronze under a cloudless blue sky, and Hux is there, walking away from him, a few steps ahead, always just out of reach. His footprints sink into the sand and disappear, and no matter how fast Kylo runs or how loudly he calls his name, he can never quite seem to catch up.


	9. ...we are forcibly removed from the Deimos

Hux first found out about his promotion to General via the First Order’s daily holonews broadcast, early into first shift one morning shortly after his twenty-eighth birthday. He’d been in the officers’ mess hall of the small base he’d been stationed at - an ice-logged building made of durasteel and concrete on what he’d thought, at the time, to be the coldest planet in the entire galaxy. That was before he’d set foot on Starkiller Base.

He’d been sipping at his caf absently, hastily scribbling diagrams in the notes of the formation report he was sending to his superiors. The sound of his name over the news broadcast drew his attention, and when he looked up, there he was, face superimposed in all its digitally-enhanced glory over an image of the Order’s symbol.

“And in an unprecedented departure from standard promotional protocol,” the newscaster went on to report, to the background noise of Hux’s mug crashing to the floor, “Hux has also been given command of the first of the Order’s newly-commissioned battlecruisers, the flagship Finalizer, for his commendable work in the fields of engineering and scientific research and his unparalleled success rate in tactical operations.” 

Hux had found himself standing, hands gripping the edge of the table, ignoring the caf pooling around his boots. The muffled conversation and soft clink of cutlery faded around him, until the newscaster’s voice was the only thing he could hear.

She concluded, “This marks the first recorded occurrence in the combined history of the Empire and First Order for an officer of his age to be awarded this accolade, and though initial polling suggests favorable reception so far, a substandard fitness report and lack of experience in the field may turn--”

The broadcast had been interrupted by a summons from Supreme Leader Snoke himself, delivered by no less than a full squadron of black-clad ‘troopers, and the next few days had passed in a blur of being whisked to an official promotion ceremony at the First Order’s temporary base of operations, getting an entire set of new uniforms with four silver command stripes proudly encircling the left sleeves, and eventually being bundled into one of a dozen shuttles bearing troops to the space station the Finalizer was docked at.

Seeing his ship for the first time would be one of the defining moments of Hux’s life. He’d stared through the shuttle’s viewport, breath fogging the outlines of the gloved fingers of one hand pressed against the plastisteel, anticipation eating a hole in his chest until finally, after what felt like weeks, they arrived at the station: and there she sat, all sleek angles and raw power, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and the most dangerous. That was before he’d met Kylo Ren.

He was met on the Finalizer by a human woman with golden hair and a tan complexion, one of the directors of Kuat-Entralla Engineering itself. She’d talked and talked, giving him a run-down of the Finalizer’s basic statistics, but Hux had been too overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the ship he now controlled to listen.

And as he stood there, feeling the bone-deep hum of her ion drive thrumming under the soles of his boots, he remembered his father, how he never really thought Hux would amount to anything, and never hesitated to tell him so. For the first time, he regretted his father’s death: would that Brendol could see him now, see what his thin slip of paper had made of himself...

He stands, now, in the exact same place as all those years ago, surrounded by the dark and sleek angles of the only place he’s ever really felt at home. But the Finalizer’s rigid lines and polished surfaces bring him little comfort today: they’ve failed to eliminate the Deimos, the combined forces of the First Order and Resistance have lost almost half their fleet, and standing at his side, General Organa is a tightly-wound ball of barely-contained hostility. Hux is in a foul mood, and on top of everything his shoulder aches where he stands at parade rest, right wrist grasped lightly in his left behind his back; a deep kind of throb worsened by the cold air in the ship’s open hangar.

Tilting his head back slightly, he peers up at the entrance to the Finalizer’s docking bay from under the rim of his hat. Wounded and smoking TIE-fighters and X-wings are still limping into range of the star destroyer’s tractor beam, a long queue of ships making their approach at what feels like a snail’s pace before slipping through the electromagnetic atmo shield and into the safety of the ship’s hull.

Next to him, Organa shifts her weight impatiently, staring out the docking bay as though her gaze could pull the Falcon in any faster. It sits, currently, near the bow of the Finalizer, waiting its turn in the queue to allow the tractor beam to tug it inside. Organa hasn't spoken a word to Hux since they called the retreat, but when he meets her eyes they are all steel and quiet judgement. He tries not to do that often.

At Hux’s hip, a short-wave comm crackles over damage reports and traffic control guidance, short bursts of orders and status reports delivered in unemotional, tired-sounding voices. Hux ignores them. Overhead, the cold lights flicker, shadows dancing over polished black floors.

By the time the Falcon breaks through the atmo shield, a wave of blue electricity shimmering outward from it in hexagonal shapes as the energy field readjusts, Hux has become fidgety, twisting his cufflinks in his fingers behind his back.

Traffic controllers direct the Falcon to a parking bay near them, and she sets down in a hiss of smoke and steam. Hux starts toward the ship to the deepening whine of her engines as they disengage, keeping his hands tightly clasped behind his back and his steps measured to restrain himself from breaking into a jog. Two Stormtrooper technicians bearing leather pouches with tools and carrying big, insulated loops of emergency wiring appear from behind the old ship, clambering onto its hull.

The Falcon’s docking ramp disengages right as Hux stops next to her, hydraulics hissing as it slides down to the ground. Vapor envelopes the ship’s hull like a glowing cloud, illuminated by the bright lights within. The scavenger girl is the first to appear through the smoke, her face drawn into a tight frown and with deep bruises under her eyes. Her arm is wound around Luke Skywalker, who may or may not be similarly pale - his facial hair makes it hard to tell. It isn’t quite clear who’s supporting whom, but when they reach the bottom of the landing ramp, Rey levers the old man’s arm over her head, leaving him to press one hand against the hull of the ship as she jogs straight into Organa’s arms for a tight embrace. 

Hux peers up the Falcon’s ramp, rising up slightly on his toes to try and see inside. Shadows trickle over the gleaming surfaces of the Finalizer as the lights waver again. Apparently, he reasons with a slight roll of his eyes, the odds against actually dealing concrete damage to the creatures just aren’t overwhelming enough without the ship’s electrical systems going haywire as well. It’s not like they need fully functioning laser cannons, anyway.

From somewhere behind Hux, Finn swoops in, wrestling Rey from Organa’s grasp and hugging her tightly. They don't exchange words, but the way they look at each other when they pull away says enough.

And then a new voice interrupts their brief reunion: “What happened?”

Hux turns. Poe Dameron, dressed in an orange flight suit with his helmet wedged underneath one elbow, approaches them from where his X-wing has been landed at a skew angle that makes Hux frown. So he survived, then. Hux supposes wishing the pilot had succumbed in battle just to spare him the lecture Dameron has apparently prepared for him might be a bit drastic.

“What the hell happened, Hux?” Dameron repeats, angrily. The pilot’s round droid trundles up behind him, hugging his calves. When Dameron stops a few paces away to glower, the droid swivels out from behind him and tilts its head up to train its eye module on Hux. And if droids were capable of facial expressions, he swears BB-8’s would be a disappointed yet expectant glare, daring him to explain himself.

Hux grates his teeth, straightening a bit defensively and clenching his fists behind his back. “Shall I summarize the battle for you in point form?” he bites out. “We failed. Obviously.”

Finn pulls away from Rey enough to jab one finger angrily in Hux’s direction. “ _ He _ nearly obliterated our fleet out of stubbornness.”

“If it were in my power to obliterate an entire fleet through the power of stubbornness alone,” Hux shoots back, flexing his fingers, “the New Republic would have been conquered years ago.” 

Finn looks at him a bit incredulously, then shakes his head and says, “You’re a maniac.”

Of all the things Hux has been called today (some by his own subordinates), ‘maniac’ is actually one of the less offensive ones, so he lets it go. Swallowing his annoyance behind a short sigh, he tries, patiently, “If we hadn't sounded the retreat when we did, we might have stood a chance at killing the creatures. They were weakening.”

“There is no possible way you could know that for sure,” Rey replies disapprovingly.

“Your pride,” Skywalker adds, “would have killed us all if it weren't for Leia.”

“Pride had nothing to do with it. The strategy was sound,” Hux snaps.

Dameron gestures sharply with his free hand. “Strategy is useless if your ego is out of control. You sacrificed hundreds of lives because you just couldn’t face up to the fact that your game plan failed. I could maybe understand that if it were just Resistance fighters out there, in the broad sense that you're an evil bastard who would jump at the opportunity to get your enemies killed and level the playing field. But your own men? Countless Stormtroopers who will never--”

“Enough!”

Dameron pauses with his mouth open and everyone turns toward the Falcon, where Kylo is standing at the top of the ramp, surrounded by a cloud of vapor and backlit by the golden light from inside the ship’s hull. Hux is definitely not relieved to see him. He absolutely, most certainly does not feel a knot of tension he hadn’t known was in his stomach dissolve into something warm. That would be preposterous. He’s simply glad to see Kylo has escaped the battle mostly unscathed, in the sense that he will be a valuable strategic asset to their team of Force users going forward. Hux’s strategy was sound. It would have worked. It will work, when they try again.

Kylo is leaning rather heavily on XN-336, who has one arm wound tentatively around his waist and whose expression is somewhere between terror and indignation. Hux can relate, as he often wears the same expression in proximity to Kylo Ren. 

“Enough,” Kylo repeats, softer, “What's done is done. We can't afford to waste time pointing fingers.” He stomps down the ramp, tugging 336 along, his heavy tread falling into syncopation with the Stormtrooper’s lighter steps and echoing off the polished and cold floors of the Finalizer. Hux wonders if he is the only one to notice Kylo’s very slight limp on the side of the bowcaster wound, more pronounced with his obvious exhaustion. His face is pale enough to make the lightsaber scar appear blood red, and his power billows out in a cloud in front of him, hitting Hux in the face like a wave of heat. It’s strong enough to stir the hem of Hux’s greatcoat, and when Kylo steps off the ramp, it sends loose pliers and wrenches lying on the floor scurrying away from him. He looks around the half circle of their temporary allies and finishes, “We need a new strategy.”

Hux opens his mouth to say something, but Rey talks over him, taking half a step in Kylo’s direction with a glare fierce enough to make XN-336 flinch: “If you ever touch me again I’ll feed you to those creatures myself.”

Kylo blinks a few times. “I'm not even close to you.” He holds his hands up to both sides demonstratively. 336 takes the opportunity to slip away from him, coming to stand next to Hux.

“You were holding my hand on the Falcon,” Rey is grating out, and next to her, Finn winces, shaking his head with a resigned, “Oh, you do not want to do that.”

“You looked like you could use the support,” Kylo tries, but the annoyance in his voice does little to make him sympathetic. His power bristles over Hux’s skin in hot little pinpricks, almost uncomfortably warm, and he resists taking a step away from him, frowning.

Rey snarls, “I would rather hold hands with a Rathtar.”

“Ben is right,” Organa interrupts from behind Hux. When he turns to look at her, she is standing with her hands on her hips, watching them with a grave expression. 

“Ben is right,” she repeats once everyone is looking at her, “We need to regroup. Rethink our strategy. But we should rest first. We all need it.”

What Hux really needs is a competent army, or failing that, a very stiff drink. He’s had about enough of being the bad guy here: he made the right choice, and he still thinks they stand a chance at defeating the creatures if they just get back out there. But everyone else is nodding in agreement, so he  sighs and grudgingly inclines his head. Apparently he’s being outranked by popular vote on his own damn ship.

“Indeed,” he pretends to agree, although rest is the very last thing on his mind right now - as his father always said, ‘if you can't beat them, take control of the situation and make them think it was all your idea in the first place’ - “We’ll adjourn for now. Let's regroup for a meeting at first shift tomorrow morning.”

Turning his gaze back to the deep blackness outside the atmo shield, he sighs slightly. In his mind’s eye he can still see the Deimos, their massive writhing tentacles and black, pockmarked skin. It’s only with great strength of will that he suppresses a deep shudder. “They move slowly. We can afford to take a few hours.”

Turning sharply on his heel, he marches toward the hangar door. Behind him, Stormtroopers armed with rifles close in on the members of the Resistance like vultures, forming a protective circle around them. Just whom they are aiming to protect, Hux muses, is up for debate. When they reach the end of the hangar they break off into a separate corridor, heading toward the quarters prepared for them. Hux heads forward on his own.

He isn't surprised to hear Kylo’s heavy, uneven steps behind him, and soon they are walking side by side, the coarse material of Kylo’s black scarf and coat brushing the back of Hux’s hand. His power simmers now, a sheen of heat like sunlight against Hux’s side. They step into the cold and angular corridors of the Finalizer towards the main elevator shaft, dodging a convoy of medical droids hastening to see to the wounds of the remaining fleet.

“Did you want something?” Hux snaps when they stop in front of the elevator, just in case Kylo is about to add anything to Dameron’s quite thorough summary of what a spectacular failure the battle was. He mashes his forefinger on the control panel in the wall a few times for good measure, before glaring at the display as it counts down each floor the elevator passes.

“No,” Kylo mutters, turning to lean his back against the wall next to the panel and crossing his arms. Whether he does this because it looks good or because he’s tired is up for debate. He asks, “Did you?”

Hux blinks, but Kylo isn’t talking to him: he turns to find XN-336 standing at attention a little ways behind them, Stormtrooper helmet firmly in place, and sighs. “336. What are you doing? Go and get some rest with the others.”

“My duty is to protect you, sir,” 336 answers, his voice sounding tired even through the vocoder, “I’ve already been away too long.”

“I don’t need you when Kylo Ren is around,” Hux argues, tilting his chin in Kylo’s direction, because no matter how annoying Kylo might be, Hux is pretty sure he can count on him to stave off any potential threats. 

“No offense, sir,” 336 begins tentatively, “But Kylo Ren looks like a strong wind could blow him over right now.”

Hux turns to Kylo, already raising his arms in protest because he knows what’s coming. But he’s too late - Kylo’s hand is out, face scar twisted into a frown, and XN-336 is making this kind of dry, choking sound.

“No… offense…” the Stormtrooper manages to gasp, hands flailing at his own throat, grappling with the invisible force constricting his air flow.

Kylo growls, “Could a strong wind do this?” and curls his fingers into a claw, tightening his Force grip and the look on his face his absolutely menacing, so Hux steps forward, reaching out to catch his wrist tightly.

He says “Enough,” and somehow, it actually works. Hux must either be starting to have some actual influence over Kylo’s behaviour (unlikely), or Kylo must be very tired, because he grudgingly lowers his hand, and XN-336 slumps over, resting his hands on his knees and gasping for air.

Hux keeps hold of Kylo’s wrist, turning over his shoulder to address 336. “You’d best get to the barracks. I’ll be fine.”

“Yes… General…” 336 nods, straightening just enough to thump his wrist lightly on his chest in an attempt at a salute before turning to go. Leaning heavily on the wall for support, he lumbers around the corner and out of sight.

Hux watches him go, then turns to mash his finger on the elevator control panel again. “At this rate I’ll be the only person in this clusterfuck of a union you haven’t permanently maimed, attempted to murder, or caused grievous offence to,” he mutters in Kylo’s general direction. “And that’s only because I’m already offended by you on a basic level every day.”

Kylo doesn’t reply, sinking back into his previous slouch against the wall. They’re alone in the corridor, and the Finalizer seems almost eerily quiet, the weight of their defeat bearing down on everyone in the ship. Even the hum of her engines and clicking of the electrical systems seems subdued. Hux can’t stop himself from fidgeting. He bounces lightly on his feet, clenches and unclenches his fists, worries at his bottom lip with his teeth.  _ Where is the damn elevator? _

The silence is edging in around him, grating on his nerves. Retreating had been a stupid move. They could have won if they had just stayed out there.

Couldn’t they?

He smashes the panel again, and then again, and again, and suddenly his anger is right there below the surface, the humiliation and rage of his defeat, and he’s hitting the panel with the palm of his hand, hard enough to crack the glass display, over and over again, can’t seem to stop and--

Kylo pushes off the wall, takes a step forward, right into Hux’s personal space, and bends down, resting his forehead on Hux’s good shoulder.

Hux stills, blinking. “What is this?” He pushes at him, slightly alarmed, “Get off.” 

But Kylo is immovable and heavy against him, sagging onto him tiredly. And Hux will admit, grudgingly, that it isn't an entirely bad feeling. Kylo’s stillness seems to seep into Hux, his warmth worming into his very muscles and forcefully unwinding the tension in them. 

And despite suspecting that there is some of his Force bullshit at work here again, Hux knows he won’t be able to move Kylo physically, anyway, so eventually he just gives in with a resigned sigh, reaching up to hold onto Kylo’s tunic lightly. If he’s to be honest, on a scale of one to watching over half of his own fleet get annihilated, letting himself be used as a pillow by Kylo Ren doesn’t even rate close to the worst thing that’s happened to him today.

The elevator pings and the door slides open, and still they stand there, unmoving. In a few moments it slides shut again, the splintered display panel going dark as it comes to rest.

Hux sighs, deeply, torn between making for his quarters for a hot shower and some sleep, or just standing here all night with Kylo draped over him like the galaxy’s most awkward fur coat.

Sleep wins. He clears his throat lightly and says, “You'd better come with me if you want to get any rest tonight. General Organa is staying in your quarters.”

It gives him a measure of petty satisfaction when Kylo blanches, almost physically wincing away from Hux. His face pulls into a lopsided grimace when he bites out, “Why?”

“It was between your quarters or mine,” Hux replies, dryly. “Initially she wanted to share a bed with me, of course, so taken by my incredible handsomeness that she almost couldn’t keep her hands off me, poor woman. I had to put my foot down.”

“That’s disgusting. You’re disgusting.” Kylo answers. He pushes Hux away with one arm and hammers on the elevator panel with his other fist. It makes a light crunching sound.

“I can’t lie,” Hux shrugs, because he’s come this far already, “it was close. Your mother is a beautiful woman. You must take after your father.”

“If you don’t shut up you’re going to take after your father too.”

“My father is dead.”

The door pings and slides open, and Kylo steps inside, turning to look at Hux. He says, “Exactly.”

Hux huffs, following him inside. The silence settles in around them again, but this time it’s a more comfortable quiet, interrupted only by the crackle of the shortwave comm at Hux’s waist  and the echo of their boots off the polished floors. Kylo is a steady presence at Hux’s side, big and solid and warm, easing some of the frustration bordering on the edge of despair Hux had been feeling before. 

The hallway outside his quarters is abandoned, the soft tones of the keypad seeming loud in the silence as he keys in. The doors have barely hissed shut behind him before he starts undressing, tossing his clothes in an uncaring pile on the floor: he’s had a rough day, all of his carefully-laid plans have gone to shit, and if he’s going to be blamed for the galaxy being consumed by planet-eating monsters anyway, he really just doesn’t see any point in being tidy.

His gloves and hat and greatcoat land near the door. One boot topples over near the wall, the other skidding in below his desk. Millicent has to dodge the tunic which was meant for the bed, but slithers down into a heap on the floor. 

Behind him, Kylo sighs softly, bending to pick the greatcoat up off the floor and brushing it off with one hand. Hux ignores him.

Lights concealed behind clariplas panels on the walls brighten automatically as he enters the refresher, flickering only slightly hesitantly before stabilizing. A quick scan of his forefinger on the panel set next to the door is all it takes for the shower to sputter, then settle into a steady hiss, temperature and water pressure programmed to his preference. 

Hux ducks under the spray with a sigh of deep contentment, resting both hands on the wall in front of him to start taking stock of his physical condition. Goosebumps run up his arms from the sudden change in temperature, and the blaster wound in his shoulder stings. The bruising around his wrists, where Rodinon had restrained him, has faded almost completely, but the area is still sensitive. His head aches dully from lack of sleep, and he finds he can’t remember when he last ate. 

He doesn’t bother opening his eyes when the door slides open behind him, or when muscled biceps and thick wrists snake around his waist, or when the hard ridge of scar tissue on Kylo’s left hip digs into his lower back.

Kylo rests his chin on Hux’s shoulder. For a brief moment, his power envelopes them like an umbrella, keeping the shower stream at bay before he manages to get it under control - Hux blinks as water streams back over his face and into his eyes. He isn’t sure how long they stand there, Kylo’s heat and presence seeping into him like honey.

He’s just starting to actually feel a bit more relaxed when Kylo breaks the silence with: “They’re saying you should have pulled our forces earlier.”

Hux goes on the defensive immediately. He freezes, one hand curling into a fist against the wall.

Kylo’s voice is a soft murmur against his ear. “General Organa seems to think you went too far, and we lost much of our fleet because of it.”

Hux frowns, turning back as best he can to glare at him. “You were there. What do you think?”

“I was in the Force with Luke and Rey. I don’t really… I couldn’t see what was happening. It sounded like you panicked.”

Hux  _ knows _ Kylo did not just imply he had a breakdown in the middle of the battle. But just in case he did: “I did not  _ panic _ .”. He barely resists making air quotes around the word. “It would have worked if they hadn’t run away with their tails between their legs like the cowards they are.” Of this he is sure. Isn’t he?

“Hux,” Kylo begins softly, then trails off uncertainly - Hux resists the light, half-hearted pressure on his mind until Kylo gives up with a soft sigh that tickles the back of his neck - “Just… What if you were wrong?”

Before he quite knows what he’s doing, Hux spins around, pushing Kylo away roughly. The back of his hand strikes Kylo’s cheek hard, across his scar. “How dare you?”

Kylo growls inarticulately, catching Hux’s wrist, hand large enough to encircle it completely and clutching it hard enough to hurt. He pulls, hard, and Hux stumbles forward roughly, right into the kiss.

In his mind, Kylo’s voice says, “ _ You were wrong. They’re dead because of you. We all will be, if you don’t fix this. _ ”

And… fuck if Kylo isn’t right. Acceptance crashes over Hux like cold water. He was wrong. He miscalculated, and they lost the battle because of it. He was wrong. They never stood a chance against the Deimos, and if he’d called the retreat when Organa first suggested it, they’d have most of their fleet still intact.  _ He was wrong. _ He melts into Kylo with something close to desperation because, fuck it all, he messed up and cost them what may have been their only chance, and the only thing that can possibly redeem him from this is the fact that Kylo still believes he can fix it.

He pulls away, squeezing his eyes shut, close enough to feel Kylo’s soft exhales on his face, and asks, “...What if I can't?”

Kylo doesn't have to ask what he means. Hux can feel him in his head, sorting through Hux’s memories of the battle in reverse order: eventually grudgingly acquiescing to Organa’s pleas for a retreat; arguing with the Resistance General that they just need more time - deep-seated frustration with how easily she wanted them to just give up; finally losing his composure and pushing Mitaka away from the weapons command system to aim the Finalizer’s ventral cannons on the Deimos himself; his disbelief at the utter ineffectuality of the amount of arsenal they'd launched at the creatures - falling back to plan B, and then to plan C when strategy after strategy failed to be effective, coming up with new formations and hastily drawing up new flight paths around launched missiles...

Despite the lingering humiliation of allowing Kylo Ren inside his head at all, much less letting him witness Hux literally go through the four stages of grief, Hux doesn't try to resist. Eventually, Kylo pulls away, his mouth twitching in that way he has when he's trying to think of the right way to say something. 

Hux waits, lets Kylo hold him, and feels moderately guilty about how good it feels to just let his guard down like this for a while.

It's quiet for so long that exhaustion is starting to creep up on him again, making his body heavy and his head fuzzy. Then Kylo says, his voice so soft Hux has to almost strain to hear it over the spray of the shower, “Okay.”

Hux looks up at him. 

Kylo continues, “Either we defeat these things, or we die. Either you come up with something, or you don’t. Either way, the Force has brought us to this moment in time, to this place. Where we go from here, the decisions we make from now on, will decide our fate.”

“Thanks,” Hux murmurs in reply, “That’s very helpful.” 

It doesn’t tell him how he’s supposed to fix things. Apparently the Force isn’t in a mood to share any potential outcomes for the future, or if it is, Kylo isn’t doing a good job of recognizing them. So there’s nothing left to do but blindly move forward.

And, well, that’s just it, isn’t it. No way to go but forward. Hux sighs softly, fighting off the feeling that he’s been transported to an alternate universe of an alternate universe where things like Kylo being right and him being wrong actually happen. 

Nothing to do but move forward… 

They may have suffered a defeat, but he’s still alive. Kylo is still alive. All the main strategic players in the battle against the Deimos are alive. As long as they live, they can fight. 

Kylo is slumping slightly onto him again, heavy and warm, clearly exhausted. So Hux makes a face over Kylo's shoulder and says, “Well. This is all very well and good. But the only place we’re going right now is to my bed for a few hours of sleep.”

They dry themselves in the refresher and hang their towels on the rack to dry, not bothering with clothes before collapsing onto Hux’s narrow bunk. It takes some shifting around before they eventually end up in a complicated tangle of arms and legs and sheets. Millicent curls up in the crook of Hux’s knee. Hux gathers as much of Kylo as he can in his arms, and they fall into companionable silence again until Kylo’s breathing evens out, his heartbeat slowing under Hux’s palm.

And as he stares across Kylo’s chest at the red numbers of the LED clock set into the wall panel beside his bed, a sense of determination settles over Hux. He has never been one to lie down and accept defeat. He has time. He can come up with a new strategy. This is going to work.

 

\---

 

It does not, in fact, work. Hours pass, marked only by the slow roll of the red numbers on the clock panel display, and though it’s quiet in the room, the inside of Hux’s head is a riot of racing thoughts and strategies and… nothing.

Not one single idea. Not one. He’s got nothing. He shifts and twitches, agonizing over his lack of inspiration until Kylo eventually gets irritated and throws one heavy leg over his waist to keep him still. He’s come up with and discarded at least seven hundred different possible scenarios for their next confrontation with the creatures, but no matter how he turns it over in his mind, he can’t see a way for them to win. 

By the time the lights automatically engage for first shift, Hux has given up on sleep and grown annoyed with Kylo’s weight crushing him (his left leg still tingles a little from where it fell asleep). Eventually, he gives up altogether, pulls on a fresh uniform and takes to pacing around the entrance chamber of his quarters. 

Hovering above the projector stand in the middle of the room, a tiny, shimmering holo-model of the Finalizer glares at him accusingly from the middle of the stratsim projection he’s put together. As he watches, a fist-sized module meant to represent the Deimos surges forward, steam-rolling over his tiny Finalizer in a shower of tiny digital explosions. Hux winces, quickly turning the simulator off at the base of the table, before slumping down at his desk. With a sigh, he rests his forehead on his arms. Millicent, perching on the edge of the desk, touches his ear lightly with one paw, ever the sole audience to his despair. Reaching up to scratch her ear, he admits, “I don’t think we can win this.”

Millicent purrs contentedly, pressing into the scratch, proving that cats don't care about galactic warfare.

By the time the members of the Resistance, XN-336, and eventually Kylo himself arrive in the Officer’s mess hall for breakfast, Hux is already on his fourth cup of caf, leg bouncing nervously under the table he half slouches over on his elbows, dejectedly. Long counters of sterile stainless steel stretch from one end of the room to the other, lined by uncomfortable, narrow benches bolted to the floor. Large display panels cover almost the entire top half of the back wall: the left panel displays what appears at first to be a wavery, flickering static image of the Deimos; a rolling timestamp in one corner suggests that it is a video feed of the slowly-moving creatures. Hux tries not to look at it. The middle screen displays a slowly-rotating 3D iteration of the First Order symbol, underneath which is listed the current status of their fleet, such as it is. The right display is dark.

XN-336 sinks down next to Hux quietly, in a blatant disregard for protocol - by rights his rank would bar him even access into this area of the Finalizer without supervision by an officer, much less the right to sit next to the ship’s commander. Hux shrugs it off, because in the grand scheme of things, when you’re about to be consumed by enormous, star-eating monsters, rank just doesn’t seem that important anymore. 

Organa and Skywalker sit down across from him, and are almost immediately served by a droid bearing plates of the standard First Order officers’ breakfast. A second droid puts a plate in front of 336, not programmed to distinguish between Officers and those who do not belong there. The breakfast consists of two sweetened protein cakes, served with honey melting into the hot crumb; a log of wobbly, gelatinous vitamin supplement, vaguely fruit-flavored; and rehydrated tofu served with preserved figs. Hux knows it meets the exact recommended daily requirements of vitamins and minerals necessary to perform in the environment of space, at a caloric requirement determined for standard basal energy expenditure by the Order’s Nutritional Research Division. His stomach turns at the smell of it.

Though the meal is admittedly lacking in variety, it is, apparently, vastly preferable to the nutritionally enhanced but bland gruel served in the Stormtrooper mess, if the way XN-336 tucks in is anything to go by. Hux waves away his own service droid in favour of a fifth cup of caf.

Apart from the clinking of cutlery from the kitchen and the quiet groan of the ship as another wave of electrical interference rolls over her, a muted air of despair overlays the otherwise empty mess hall. Organa and Skywalker poke at their food without really eating. Kylo is standing at the viewport, staring in what is undoubtedly the direction of the Deimos, though the Finalizer is far enough away for them not to be visible to the naked eye.

When the silence starts to grate on his nerves, Hux slips his datapad out of his coat pocket. There are dozens of new notifications and reports that require his attention, but as he thumbs through the different screens absently, he can’t help but wonder if there is even a point to any of this: what good will reallocating finances to offset the loss of sponsorship for the rest of the fleet do when there is no more First Order to command it? What use is there in deploying forces to occupy planets in strategic locations in the Mid Rim Territories when those planets lie dormant and lifeless in the wake of the Deimos? 

His despondent musing is interrupted by the hiss of the sliding mess hall doors and the hurried trample of three sets of feet bustling excitedly up to the table. Next to Hux, XN-336 half raises out of his seat defensively, and Hux looks up as well, annoyed - whomever it is is clearly inept at reading the atmosphere of a room and Hux will not tolerate such blatant disrespect for his depression on his own ship--

Oh. It’s the scavenger girl, a huge grin splitting her face, the traitorous ex-Stormtrooper, who looks nervous, and the pilot, who as always, appears irritated just by virtue of being in Hux’s presence. Behind them, BB-8 rolls to a stop, rocking back and forth slightly. XN-336 lowers himself back onto the bench again, going back to shoveling food into his mouth.

Before Hux can impress on them that there is an appropriate time for this amount of energy, and half an hour into first shift is  _ not it _ , Rey interrupts him with: “We know how to defeat the Deimos.”

Hux blinks. This statement captures the attention of everyone in the room. Organa lowers the fork that had been halfway to her mouth, and next to her, Skywalker straightens up with a curious expression. Both twist around on the narrow bench to look at the new arrivals. Even Kylo turns from the viewport to look at Rey, fists clenched at his sides and looking tense as usual.

Rey continues, smiling, “Well, really it was Finn’s idea. Go on, Finn,” - she pokes Finn lightly in the side - “tell them.”

Clearly not used to having everyone’s attention on him, Finn looks a bit flustered, rubbing the back of his head. This should be good. Hux has a hard time believing the ex-Stormtrooper came up with a strategy when he himself could not.

“Yes, Finn,” he drawls, leaning back slightly and wrapping his hands around his mug, “Tell us.” He ignores Dameron’s pointed glare, looking at Finn expectantly.

“Well, okay,” Finn starts, hesitantly, “So we tried to attack them with artillery from the outside, but it didn’t work, right?”

“We know that they somehow convert the Force into energy,” Dameron interjects, “which they consume. The theory is that they can use that same energy to create some kind of barrier, or, or forcefield around themselves.”

Rey continues, “That purple aura around them; that’s why attacking them from the outside was ineffective. But!” She looks at Finn excitedly.

Finn picks up, “That got me thinking, what if we attacked from the inside?”

Hux narrows his eyes and stares at them from beneath the rim of his hat. It is entirely too early and he has had entirely too little sleep to be able to handle their energetic, rapid-fire conversation. Their forceful, positive energy almost physically batters against him, aggravating his headache.

Opposite him, Organa mirrors his thoughts. “Slow down,” she pushes her hand out, palm down, to illustrate, “You’re not making any sense.”

Dameron waves his hands back and forth. “No, no, hear him out. This is good.” From somewhere in the vicinity of his knees, BB-8 chirps cheerfully and encouragingly. (Hux tells himself it probably won’t do much to improve his relationship with the Resistance if he shoots the droid).

“So,” Finn carries on, “if our theory is right, we know they have this energy field protecting them, like a shell.”

Hux grudgingly admits the kid might be onto something - such an energy field would also account for the electrical interference on the Finalizer.

“But inside,” Finn is saying, “they’re gonna be vulnerable. Like, like. I dunno, a daelfruit.”

“... A daelfruit.” Hux repeats, raising one eyebrow lightly. 

“Sure,” Finn says, “Hard on the outside, soft on the inside.”

Hux is about to point out the fallacy of comparing galaxy-devouring creatures from some unknown abyss to what is, essentially, a slightly bitterer lychee. But Kylo interrupts him: “It’s a good strategy.”

Everyone turns to look at Kylo. Finn looks slightly shocked.

Kylo shrugs his good shoulder and says, “It can work.”

Of course he agrees with Little Mister Fucking Sunshine and the Happy Twins (Plus Droid).

“Fine,” Hux huffs in irritation, “Blow them up from the inside, all good. Where are we going to find a bomb capable of inflicting that amount of damage?”

Rey bites her lip and squints a bit, looking apologetic. “That’s the part you’re not going to like…”

He looks at her, then at Dameron, down at BB-8, and then finally up at Finn, who appears to have gained a sudden interest in the tiling on the floor. What does she mean, he’s not going to--

Oh. Oh no. No, no, no. 

The sudden realization has Hux surging out of his seat fast enough to knock over the mug of caf, spilling a dark pool of liquid diagonally across the table. “No. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances.”

Dameron holds out his hands placatingly. “We don’t have a choice, General. Detonating the Finalizer’s ion engines is the only way to make sure the blast is big enough.”

Hux shoves the bench back (XN-336 grabs the table to keep from toppling over backward) and stalks around the table, grabbing Dameron by the front of his shirt and dragging him right up to his face. “Listen carefully; I’m only going to say this once. I am not self-destructing my ship in those things.”

“General Hux,” Organa says pleadingly, standing now as well, “It may be the only chance we have.”

“Over my dead body,” Hux snarls at her, clenching Dameron’s shirt tight enough that it starts to rip slightly beneath his fingers. Rey tries to shoulder in between them, tugging at Hux’s wrist, trying to make him let go. Hux doesn’t.

“It’s just a ship,” Skywalker has the audacity to say, “As I understand it you already have several others on commission.”

Skywalker doesn’t understand ‘it’ at all. “It’s not just ‘a ship’. She’s  _ my _ ship, I  _ earned _ her. You won’t take her from me.”

He’s about to shove Rey away from him, but Kylo is next to him somehow, one large hand coming to rest on Hux’s shoulder, heavy and warm. Hux turns to look at him, and the moment he meets his eyes he realizes his mistake: Kylo worms into his mind, drenching him with an infuriating sense of calm, and his mind voice says ‘ _ this is how it has to be’ _ , and Hux knows he’s lost this battle. He shoves Dameron away roughly and stalks to the wall, pressing both hands to the cool, grey tiles and leaning down, just focusing on getting his breathing under control.

Somewhere behind him, Skywalker asks, “So how do we do this?”

“...Finn?” Organa prompts when there is no immediate answer.

Finn’s voice is soft. “Well, Ma’am… I was thinking we could trigger a bomb down in the Finalizer’s fusion chamber. We’d evacuate the ship first, obviously.”

Hux mouths “obviously” to himself sarcastically, turning around to lean back against the wall and crossing his arms.

Finn continues, “Then we set her on autopilot straight into the Deimos’, er, mouth.”

“The idea,” Dameron carries on, tugging on his shirt to try and straighten it and glaring in Hux’s direction, “is that they’ll have so much Force-converted energy inside them by the time the Finalizer explodes, it’ll set off a nuclear fusion reaction.”

“Wait, I don’t understand. Didn’t you just say the Force energy is outside of them, like a shield?” asks XN-336, who is apparently the only other sane person in the entire room. “How’s it on the inside suddenly?”

“Right,” says Rey excitedly, holding onto Dameron’s arm, “We were getting to that. It means changing our strategy, too. Us Force users, I mean.” She looks between Kylo and Skywalker. “Instead of diverting the Force away from the Deimos, we channel it straight into them. Create a river of it so huge, they’re forced to open up wide to take it all in.”

“Give them the meal of a lifetime. Give the Finalizer plenty of room to fly straight on in,” adds Dameron, who apparently specializes in hammering nails into coffins.

“And when they’ve converted all that energy inside of them...” Finn brings his fists together, then pulls them apart, waggling his fingers lightly.

“Boom. Fusion.” XN-336 says softly. 

By this point, Hux has calculated the exact amount of time it would take to wrestle the Stormtrooper’s blaster rifle from him and shoot every one of these people in the head, starting with the trio of fucking positivity who are just standing there, smiling, as if they haven’t just suggested Hux blow up what is, essentially, his entire life.

He doesn’t quite start for the rifle before Organa says, nodding slowly, “This can work. But in the end, the Finalizer belongs to General Hux.”

Everyone turns to look at him. He is still half wondering how many of them he can take down before someone stops him. But… He uncrosses his arms with a sigh, taking his hat off and running a hand through his hair. The traitor’s strategy is sound. He can’t deny it. And as much as he loves his ship, the fate of the galaxy is literally at stake. If he could see any other solution… but he can’t. He’s failed, again, and this time the price for doing so will be his legacy.

He lets his head thud back against the wall. “...I guess we’re blowing up my ship.”

“Yes!” Rey exclaims, hugging onto Finn tightly. Dameron claps the ex-Stormtrooper’s back, and even Organa and Skywalker exchange relieved smiles to the background of BB-8’s quiet, triumphant whistle.

Kylo walks up and leans back against the wall next to Hux, watching them. He says, softly, “You made the right choice.”

Hux growls, pushing away from the wall and grabbing the front of his tunic to haul him closer. “You’re going to pay for this.”

Kylo blinks, surprise twisting his brow. “Me?” he asks incredulously, “Why?”

“If you had killed that fucking traitor when you had the chance,” Hux explains, trying to project an image of Finn in Stormtrooper gear, escorting an imprisoned Dameron off the Finalizer, into Kylo’s mind, “I’d still have my ship.” 

Kylo grabs his wrists and pulls them away forcefully, snapping, “If it weren’t for that ‘fucking traitor’, we wouldn’t have a plan. If it were up to  _ you _ to come up with a strategy for killing these things, we’d all be dead.”

Hux glares at him. Throwing his failure in his face is exactly the kind of thing Kylo excels at, but that was cold, even for him. He tugs his wrists out of Kylo’s grasp, turning on his heel and stalking to the door, ignoring Kylo’s pleading “Hux!” behind him. 

Outside, Phasma is standing guard, rifle cradled in the crook of her elbow. She salutes smartly, but her hand lowers hesitantly when she sees the look on Hux’s face.

Hux ignores whatever she starts to say with, “Sound a ship-wide alert. All personnel to start evacuation procedures immediately.”

“...Sir?” she asks, tentatively, “The whole ship? What is--”

“That’s an order, Captain.”

He stalks ahead of her and she jogs to catch up with him. “Yes, sir. What about the prisoners, sir.”

Ah yes. The splinter faction. Rodinon and Caplan and their little lackeys. Hux’s father was never one to believe in mercy. ‘Pardon’ wasn’t in his vocabulary. Hux is in a foul enough mood to decide that, for once, his father may have been right. Don’t give anyone the chance to stab you in the back twice.

“We don’t have enough shuttles for the prisoners,” he says.

“But sir,” Phasma argues, “The Finalizer is equipped with more than enough life support and emergency shuttles for all--”

“There aren’t enough shuttles, Phasma,” Hux interrupts, and turns his glare on her.

She subsides with a soft, “Sir,” and breaks off down an adjoining corridor, jogging down to one of the wall-consoles. A few moments later the claxon starts up, red lights bathing the black and chrome corridors like blood.

Hux clenches his fists and presses forward to the command bridge, walking the halls of his ship for the last time.


	10. Once More, With Feeling

Kylo allows himself to drift, weightlessly, in the warm and dark and quiet embrace of the Force; eyes closed and body relaxed, the back of his neck pressed into the ribbed-leather curve of the passenger seat in the Falcon's cockpit. He isn't meditating, not exactly: he hasn't opened himself to the whispered voices in the dark, to the blind uncaring guidance of the Force. Instead, he allows himself to just _be_ , to just exist in the flow of life as another soft exhale, one of countless little lives in the endless black of the universe.

The ambient sounds of the Falcon saturate the darkness around him - the soft drone of her engines, tiny beeps and clicks as her systems auto-calibrate, the rustle of cloth as Rey shifts in the seat in front of him, XN-336's gloved fingers tapping the control panel in front of him, checking and re-checking hyperdrive ignition commands and flight paths. The Stormtrooper's emotions are loud, rolling off him in waves of apprehension and excitement mingled with hope bordering on desperation. It makes Kylo's stomach turn.

He's exhausted. In the aftermath of Finn's plan the Finalizer had erupted in a bustle of activity, klaxons blaring and hallways bristling with supplies being carted to evacuation pods and droids plugged into wall consoles downloading the ship's data banks and the last wounded personnel from Starkiller Base being transported to the hangar on floating medical stretchers. Kylo had gathered what little he owns in the way of worldly possessions (helmet, lightsaber, spare coat, his grandfather's mask) and had spent his last hours on the Finalizer sitting on the coarse, grey carpet of his room, the only place he's ever felt really at home. He'd spread his possessions out before him in a half-moon - everything he had to show for his life - and hugged his knees, and closed his eyes.

Somewhere near the bridge, Hux's emotions had burned brightly enough to resonate through the Force, a heartsick mess of resentment-bitterness-despair. Kylo hadn't had the heart to seek him out. And by the time he'd collected himself enough to get up and clip the lightsaber to his belt, slip the helmet over his head and shrug into the spare coat (Vader's helmet having been carefully placed into a hexagonal clariplas box and bundled into a black canvas bag bearing the Order's symbol, slung over one shoulder), it had been time to leave.  

Kylo opens his eyes, letting the color and movement of the cockpit around him blur into focus. It's darker than it should be outside the angular-round viewport of the Falcon; endless lightyears of black, dead space left in the wake of the Deimos. The far-off, weak pinpoints of remaining stars are a poor solace, fighting valiantly but ultimately powerless against the hunger of the creatures.  

The purplish glow of energy around the Deimos is the only light in this part of space. It saturates the left corner of Kylo's vision, growing and shrinking with the undulating movement of their immense tentacles (his eyes refuse to look there, sliding away to the happy orange-yellow-blue lights of the Falcon's controls with the adrenaline-rush of terror of something right behind you in the dark).

And right in the path of the creatures sits the Finalizer, thin blue streaks of light - energy trails from a thousand escape pods' engines - streaming away from her like comets, a meteor shower erupting from her bowels as they shoot into hyperspace and towards safety.

At one point in Kylo's childhood, someone had given him a set of toy space ships. There had been a meticulously detailed MC-75 cruiser with its own tiny starfighter squadron, B-wings and X-wings and a tiny Y-wing bomber; and an Imperial prison barge with a guard complement of older-model TIE-fighters. But his favourite had been the small model star destroyer, hundreds of pinprick windows hand-painted onto the mold, with engines that glowed plasma blue when a small switch on the bottom of the toy was flipped. It fit exactly in the palm of Kylo's hand, and for the span of a few months before his seventh birthday, he refused to go anywhere without it.

From this distance, the Finalizer looks exactly like it; a small model toy with pinprick windows and glowing engines, and if Kylo holds his hand out and tilts it just _so_ , he can make Hux's ship line up exactly with the curve of his palm, the spear-point tip of her pointed hull resting lightly on his thumb. She faces the Deimos fearlessly, ion drives burning low and hull cast in the unholy purple glow of their energy, and if Kylo curls his fingers in just a bit he can pretend to grab the star destroyer in his hand and fly it away, run off with it in one outstretched arm high above his head like he so often had as a child.

"The evacuation is nearly complete," XN-336 interrupts his musing, staring at a readout on the panel to his side - Kylo drops his hand quickly - "Once the last escape pods have cleared the Finalizer we should be ready to go."

"Any news from Leia?" Next to Kylo, Luke leans forward to stick his head between the pilots' seats, bracing his elbows on his knees.

XN-336 reaches to the comms display set in the middle of the control panel below the viewport, fiddling with the toggle. The display flips through several screens of dimly-glowing orange glyphs and coordinate sets and archived charts before settling on the open channel linked to the Finalizer, reports streaming in from the star destroyer in a cascade of messages, stacking on top of each other until they fill the screen. He scrolls down through the latest messages, then shakes his head. "Not yet, sir. They're sharing the General's shuttle, though, so I expect they'll be among the last to leave. Hah, that should be an interesting journey." (336 mutters this last bit to himself, then flinches slightly as if expecting rebuke, daring half a glance over his shoulder in Kylo's direction. Kylo ignores him.)

Luke sits back in his chair and says, "We should start linking together now. We're going to want to start channeling the Force towards the creatures as soon as--"

His sentence cuts off abruptly as the Falcon shudders forcefully, pitching forward hard enough to fling him from his seat. The cockpit is bathed in a bright purple glare as the Force-shield around the Deimos flares, enormous billows of flame-like energy curling off their skin with the violence of solar flares. Kylo braces himself against the seat in front of him as the ship lurches, his stomach flipping as she pitches downward sharply. The lights in the cockpit go dark and from somewhere above, an urgent beeping alarm goes off. Rey scrabbles for hold on the edge of the control panel as XN-336 frantically flips switches and tries to re-engage the ignition and life support. Kylo reaches for the Force, ready to send his power into the bones of the ship and hold her together if needed, but he's barely formed the command in his mind before everything stabilizes again - the lights flicker back on, the blaring alarm cuts off mid-beep, and the Falcon levels out, calm and still, engines whirring back to life and oxygen hissing through the vents.

There is a brief silence, broken only by the pounding of Kylo's heart in his ears. Then Rey asks, "What was that?", a bit shakily. Kylo grips the backrest of her chair, leaning forward in his seat to stare out the viewport.

The Finalizer has gone completely dark.

The thousand pinpricks of viewport lights lining her sides are black and cold, there are no light-trailing escape pods to color the darkness of space around her, and on the Falcon's display, the steady cascading stream of happy orange communication from the Finalizer has frozen.

And the Force shudders with the sudden sensation that something is wrong, _very_ wrong; it echoes in Kylo's bones, shaking him to his very core. He feels suddenly cold, mouth dry, pulse racing frantically in his throat.

Luke seems to feel it too, straightening slowly until he stands, slightly bent over, cybernetic hand gripping the back of XN-336's headrest hard enough to dent the soft leather. They are all staring at the Finalizer now in silent apprehension; Kylo's jaw seizes up, his stomach churning. From the corner of his vision, the writhing tips of massive black tentacles stretch out toward the star destroyer, quivering as they strain to reach it. Kylo is about to order XN-336 to fly the Falcon over there, Deimos or no, when the dim flickering of a faint, red-tinted light in the bridge viewport of the Finalizer draws his attention. He stares at it, and stares, until slowly, the red glow spreads through the ship, flickering in porthole after porthole until all her viewports are saturated with it. Eventually, the glow reaches her engines; they stutter to life, spinning turbines faltering a few times before settling.

Emergency power.

Rey glances back at Luke uncertainly, biting her lip, and the concern in her eyes echoes Kylo's.

Luke, for his part, sits down again slowly, rubbing his hands over his thighs to straighten his robes. "Everything is fine," he says, softly, but his voice wavers a bit, and despite his words the look in his eyes says that nothing in the world is fine at all. "Let's start channeling the Force."

And Luke closes his eyes, and Rey leans back in her chair and does the same, but Kylo still has the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong, a deep and visceral upset in the pit of his stomach that refuses to go away, and he can't take his eyes off the Finalizer, even when escape pods start jettisoning off from the star destroyer again and things seem to go back to normal.

 _Everything is fine_. Taking a deep breath, he pushes the feeling to the back of his mind and tries to center himself, keeping one eye on the Finalizer even as he reaches out in the Force towards Luke and Rey, even as he pulls them into his mind and gets pulled into their minds as the link forms.

It's much easier to channel the Force into the Deimos than it was to try and guide it away from them: where before, he had felt like the stone splitting the river, now he is the lake from which it springs, an endless well of all the life force of the universe. The river of the Force gets siphoned from him as fast as he can feed it, a greedy and steady pull, fed through him and Luke and Rey on a scale so vast that he can hardly find himself in it at all: instead, he acts only as an amplifier, and through him, the river becomes a sudden ocean, rolling in waves towards the gaping mouths of the creatures.

The abrupt pull of it is strong enough to knock him off his proverbial feet, a massive rush of energy surging through him fast enough and vast enough to overwhelm his senses. He lifts both hands in front of him to help direct the flow; a tiny rudder changing the course of a massive ship. The Force rushes around him and through him, fast and violent, bearing down on his mind and sinking into his bones. He doesn't even try to hold on: instead, he encourages it, the roaring surge of the rapids right before they reach the fall.

Dimly, he senses the last escape pod clearing the Finalizer. Squinting to try and blearily focus beyond the turbulence of the Force clamoring his senses, he can just make out slightly larger and green-tinted energy streaks as it slips into hyperspace. Hux's shuttle. Kylo takes a deep breath, and exhales into a sigh of relief. With Hux and his mother off the Finalizer and on their way to safety, he can focus all his attention on channeling the Force into the Deimos. (The feeling that something is wrong still presses on him heavily, but he puts it down to the immensity of what is at stake if they fail, and pushes it firmly to the back of his mind).

The Force pours through him and towards the Deimos, and Kylo lets himself drown in it, gives so much of himself to the push of it that he starts to lose himself in it; his vision blurs and fades to black, the physical awareness of his body disappearing limb by limb until only his mind remains, bound to some physical aspect of him in the barest sense through his connection to Rey and Luke.

It's really kind of peaceful, like being underwater, the world turning into a distorted and distant rendition of itself. The rush becomes so loud that it warps into a kind of whitewashed silence, the searing current of its energy both hot and ice cold at the same time. And then, faintly and echoing as if over a vast distance, he hears Hux's voice.

His eyes blink open. It's enough to break him out of the trance immediately, bringing the siphoned river to a lurching and stuttering halt as all of them are rudely pulled out of the river by his awareness.

"Oy!" Rey starts, angrily, but Kylo holds up a hand sharply to silence her. She blinks, mouth snapping shut in indignation.

Outside the viewport, the Finalizer drifts just out of reach of one great tentacle, keeping a teasing distance as it whips and curls and strains towards it.

Static gristles over the comm and then Hux's voice says, "Come in, Falcon."

XN-336 reaches up to flip a switch above his head, and leans over to press his forefinger on the mic button to activate their end of the comm. "This is the Falcon. Go ahead, General."

"The evacuation has been completed successfully." Static hisses, cutting off part of his sentence. "--personnel have cleared into the safe zone --- countdown has been initiated on the explosives in the fusion chamber."

The feeling of dread in the pit of Kylo's stomach rises up in his throat like bile, not quite strong enough to be a Force vision, but he knows, is suddenly absolutely _certain_ something horrible is about to happen.

And then XN-336 says, "Sir... your comm signal..."

Kylo stares at 336, then slowly tilts his head down, following his gaze to the display panel where the coordinates of the open commlink are shown. It's coming from the Finalizer.

Slowly, keeping his voice measured despite the storm suddenly raging in his chest, Kylo says, "Hux. Why are you on the Finalizer."

Hux's voice, when he answers, sounds tired, losing the cruel edge it's always maintained even in their most intimate moments. His cadence falters, cultured Imperial accent blurring into something softer. "There's been an electrical malfunc---." He crumbles into static. He sounds weary and so soft, so unlike the General Kylo knows that it shocks him almost more than Hux's words when he finishes, "All systems are down."

Kylo stares at the panel, Hux's comm coordinates wavering faintly as his eyes start to burn. He isn't breathing. He doesn't immediately understand, and when he's stayed quiet long enough Hux fills the silence to explain, "I can only imagine getting this close to the Deimos' energy fiel--- caused a fatal surge in the wiring. Life support --- running on emergency reserves."

"You need to get out of there," is all Kylo can think to say, "now."

He lifts his gaze to the Finalizer, peering at it as if he can see Hux, a single tiny, dark shadow in the red glow of the bridge viewport. In the background, he's dimly aware of Luke's cybernetic hand, coming to rest on his shoulder.

Over the comm, Hux huffs what may be a soft, derisive laugh. "Would that I could. Thing is --- systems are down. All of them." He pauses, then sighs softly, his breath crackling and tinny over the comm. "Including the autopilot."

Kylo frowns.

"And everyone's been evacuated," Hux says, softly, and disappears into static, "Your mother, too. I'm -- only one that's left."

Kylo stands, leaning between Rey and XN-336 to press both palms onto the control panel, framing the speaker Hux's voice is coming from. "No."

Hux stays quiet. On the display panel, the coordinates of the Finalizer tick down in ever-decreasing numbers as she slowly draws near the Deimos.

"How will you get off the ship before it explodes?" Kylo asks, but he already knows the answer.

Hux says, "I won't."

Kylo squeezes his eyes shut for a second. He's struggling to breathe. Inhaling deeply through his nose, he opens his eyes to look up at the Finalizer. "Hux. No. You can't do this."

"I think I have to," Hux says, slowly. "If I don't, we --- die. It's really quite simple."

"It's not simple!" Kylo counters, yelling, "Don't be an idiot! You're..." he casts about frantically, grabbing hold of the first thing that comes to mind. "You're not a pilot. How are you going to steer the Finalizer?"

"I don't have to steer her," Hux says, and he sounds infuriatingly calm and patient, "I just need to go straight."

Kylo stamps down on his panic, clenches his fists on the panel and grits his teeth, growling. Then it hits him. "The prisoners! The prisoners are still on board. Let them fly the ship."

"Come on, Kylo," Hux argues, "Rodinon? Kaplan? You honestly --- going to fly the Finalizer to their deaths when they could just fly her --- of here and into Unknown Space?"  

"They wouldn't get far. She's on emergency power," Kylo mutters, firmly ignoring the fact that Hux is, of course, right.

"You made Rodinon eat his own hand," Hux points out.

"Just the one finger."

Hux sighs, fades into static, and says, "--- not going to work."

"Will you stop shooting down my ideas?"

"Why don't you come up with a good one and we'll see."

Kylo growls in frustration, slamming both his palms on the control panel. He looks to the side, past Rey's concerned gaze and at the wall panel beside her, at the confusion of switches and dials and blinking yellow-orange lights. In the silence that follows Rey shuffles a bit awkwardly, turning away from Kylo to frown out the viewport.

The comm crackles softly when Hux says, "Look. Against my better judgement, --- going to have to do this."

"This isn't fair," is all Kylo can think to reply with. He looks back at the Finalizer, but no matter how hard he stretches his senses, she's too far away, and he can't feel Hux's presence at all.

"No, it's not," Hux sighs, "But it's what we have. Me, or them. You know --- how it has to end."

Kylo surges forward, head dropping down and hair spilling into his face and his eyes burning as he fights back tears. "For fuck's sake, just... Hux, just... let's just think about this--"

"We don't have that luxury," Hux interrupts, and he is suddenly the General again, clipped and cold and businesslike and it makes Kylo ache with the acceptance and resignation it implies. Kylo opens his mouth, but no sound comes out, words stuck behind the physical lump in his throat.

Static gristles, and Hux's voice wavers over the words, "Kylo, I..."

The comm crackles over his hesitant pause. Kylo yells, "I won't let you do this!"

His words echo into the silence. He can hear Hux's quiet exhale over the comm, a soft explosive sigh bitten off by a quick "Goodbye."

And the commlink goes dark, and Hux is gone.

Kylo stares down at the blank panel disbelievingly. Just like that, Hux is gone. Hux is...

He yells incoherently, slamming his hands into the console hard enough to crack open two palm-sized indents. The console protests in indignation, letting out an alarmed series of beeps. He turns and pushes roughly past Luke, ducking out of the Falcon's cockpit and down the narrow, curving corridor to the common area, where he starts to pace.

Short, heavy steps carry him from one end of the small room to the other. He dodges the broken remains of the dejarik table, clenching and unclenching his fists, steps echoing on the hollow durasteel grating as he glares unseeingly at the tangles of grey, ribbed tubing and pipes and wires and panels lining the walls.

Hux is gone. He whirls, stomping to the other end of the room, to the stack of crates and bags of supplies over which Luke's grey cloak is draped, Rey's staff leaning against the wall. His shadow stretches in front of him and snaps back as he passes under the white lights set in the ceiling.

Hux can't be gone. There is no way he's going to let this happen. He turns and starts back to the other end of the room, only to collide with Rey, who throws her hands up defensively and backpedals a few steps away from him.

"I'm going to rescue him!" Kylo blurts, louder than he'd intended, and then blinks as the realization catches up with him. He's going to rescue Hux. Obviously, that's what he's going to do. He whirls around, eyes frantically searching the common area until they come to rest on two square emergency control panels, set into the wall next to the corridor and covered by clariplas lids. And just like that, he has a plan.

He ignores Rey's "What? How?" to shoulder past her, flipping up the cover of one display and slamming his fist on the emergency release. Two panels set into the ceiling hiss open and a set of enviro-suits tumbles out, dangling from hooks fixed into a compartment in the roof like empty, flaccid corpses. Long, segmented metal arms swing out from an alcove above, bearing helmets with reflective chrome visors. One arm snaps as it descends, the helmet crashing to the floor, its reflective visor cracking. It rolls over the grates with a kind of rasping sound before bumping into Kylo's boot.

He nudges it away, reaching up to tug one of the suits off its hook. It's made of rubbery, beige material that dents like sponge under Kylo's fingers, tiny little cracks over the bends of its shoulders and discoloured patches near the neck where the life support pack slots into the helmet acting as clear markers of its age. The suits are old and dusty and have been up there for probably longer than can guarantee their safety, but they're all he's got. He flips the suit around and jabs his finger on the display built into the life support pack on its back. It stutters to life, giving him readings of the oxygen levels and pressure markers.

From somewhere behind him, Rey says, "What do you think you're doing?"

"Hux will have cut reserves to the Finalizer's life support everywhere except the bridge. I'll need oxygen until I can get there."

Rey is quiet for a while, then says, "You're going. To the Finalizer."

"Uh huh." Kylo isn't really thinking about it - having decided a course of action, his body runs on autopilot without too much interference from his brain. One foot in front of the other, step by step: he unhooks the remaining helmet from the arm dangling from the ceiling, and connects the suit's oxygen lines to it; places the helmet on the floor, and arranges the suit in front of him. As far as survival techniques go, this has gotten him through many difficult choices Snoke had wanted him to make in the past. Don't think about it. Just get it done.

He's stepped into the suit with one leg when Luke's hand grips his upper arm, spinning him around to look at him. "Where are you going, Ben?"

"To the Finalizer, apparently," Rey answers with exasperated reproach, "You know, the ship that's about to be turned into thermonuclear dust."

Kylo ignores her, shrugging Luke's hand off his arm and tugging the suit up to his waist. The rubbery material conforms to the shape of his legs, air automatically decompressing as the suit's pressure systems start stabilizing. It catches on the lightsaber clip, and Kylo pulls and tugs on it until he finally just unclips the lightsaber in irritation, dropping the hilt carelessly to the floor.

Luke is staring at him in that way he has - even though Kylo isn't looking at him, he can feel his eyes boring into his skull, the pressure of his power digging into his mind as Luke uses the Force to pick the plan straight out of his head. He says, "You want to take one of the Falcon's escape pods to the Finalizer."

Kylo shrugs one shoulder. He doesn't need to explain, because Luke has already seen his plan: get to the Finalizer, board as close to the bridge as he can, run like hell. Get Hux, get the fuck out. Simple.

Luke reaches out toward him, keeping his voice level, the old familiar tone of the long-suffering teacher explaining the most obvious concept to his student. "Ben, you can't fly the Falcon's escape pods. They're old. They hardly have rudimentary steering, if it even works anymore."

Kylo pauses in the act of fastening the suit's belt around his waist, then shakes his head. "I'll use the Force." His hands are shaking, and he can't quite seem to fasten the catch, his fingers seeming larger and clumsier than usual. He growls in frustration, smashing the two parts together.

"This is suicide," Rey proclaims, "That ship is going to blow up right around you."

Kylo ignores her. The catch slips out of his fingers again and he growls in frustration.

Then Luke is there, taking the two parts of the belt from him gently and slotting them together. He's looking down at his hands, one human and one cybernetic, and says, "You'll never make it in time. The countdown has already begun. No way you get off the Finalizer before the bombs go off. If you do this, you die."

Kylo pushes him away by the shoulders. "Just watch me, old man."

He slips his arms into the torso of the vacuum suit, shrugging it up onto his shoulders and reaching down to hook the bottom ends of the zipper into each other.

Rey comes to stand next to Luke, small hands clenched into angry fists, glaring at Kylo. "And what about the Deimos?" she challenges, "You're just going to leave us to deal with them on our own? Someone still has to feed the Force into them, in case you've forgotten."

Kylo whirls on her, taking an inadvertent step in her direction. "You want my help channeling the Force into these things? Then let me go and save him." He grits his teeth. "Nothing has to change. I just need to do this first."

"You can't be serious," Rey groans, looking at him incredulously. "That maniac," - she gestures in the vague direction of the Finalizer - "committed genocide. He killed billions of people, Kylo. You're not seriously going to risk the fate of the Galaxy to try and _save_ him?"

"I don't expect you to understand," Kylo bites out.

"You're right," Rey says, throwing her hands up, "I don't understand. And I certainly don't understand what makes you think I would ever agree to help him. To help _you_. After everything you've done?" She stares at him, then finishes quietly, "He deserves to die."

And the urge to do physical harm to her is suddenly almost overpoweringly strong. He's so angry at this tiny girl, at the audacity of her to suggest that Hux is any less important to him than the fate of the Galaxy, and he clamps down on his rage only through extreme effort of will, clenching his jaw and taking deep breaths through his nose.

And then Luke comes to stand between them, holding out his hands in Rey's direction. "It's not that simple, Rey."

She whirls on him with a betrayed expression. "Not that simple? The Force demands balance!" And, softer, "You taught me that."

"What you want is vengeance, not balance," Luke says, and his tone reminds Kylo of warm nights spent sitting at Luke's knee, listening to stories of a faraway desert planet. Luke continues, "The Force doesn't demand anything. The symmetry of Dark and Light is the very nature of its existence, and it will always restore that balance itself, whether or not we do anything to aid it."

Rey stares at Luke in murderous disbelief, hurt and betrayal written plainly across her face. She turns away from them and walks to the wall, leaning against it with her back to them. Kylo realizes he is still paused in the middle of pulling the zip up to his chin, and finishes the action.

He says, softly, "I can save him and still help you channel the Force into these things. There's enough time. I'll make it."

But Luke says, "No, you won't. You're not thinking straight. You'll never make it off the ship before it explodes. Ben, if you do this, you're going to die."

Kylo swallows, uncertainty chewing at the corners of his mind. But the Force whispers to him, a vision of the future: a wavering and pale image of Hux smiling at him, and he's never seen Hux smile before so it must be real. Kylo shakes his head, the vision dissipating, and tells Luke, "Not if you help me shield."

Rey turns to stare at him over her shoulder. "... You want us to help you shield against a nuclear explosion."

Kylo straightens, staring at Luke. He wonders if he saw the vision as well.

Rey says, "You've gone mad."

"You're already going to be channelling the Force into these things. Just... help me shape it, help me make a shield..." Kylo says, daring a glance at Rey, "... It will work."

He can't quite manage to reduce himself to begging for their help, but he puts as much of his desperation into his eyes as he can, looking back at Luke and not bothering to shield himself, letting his emotions batter against them.

After what feels like hours, Luke sighs, breaking his gaze to look down at his feet and crossing his arms over his chest. Relief floods through Kylo like a tidal wave. In the background, Rey throws her hands up to say, "This is insane!", but Kylo ignores her to fasten the clasp of the enviro-suit around his neck, jamming the helmet down over his head. It seals with a soft hiss. His hands are shaking much less, now.

The chrome visor fades to clear as its system boots up, the HUD overlaying everything with faint lines of light and statistics and readouts displayed in outdated graphics.

He lifts his forearm, engaging the display panel set above his wrist and activating the life support pack, voice sounding tinny through the helmet's vocoder when he says "Just help me shield when the time comes. I'll keep channeling the Force towards the creatures with you on my way there."

Luke shakes his head and mutters, "You're going to get us all killed, kid."

Kylo looks up at him. "But you will help, right?"

"I don't see that we have a choice," Rey replies in Luke's stead, coming to stand next to him and glaring at Kylo. "You're going, aren't you?"

Kylo doesn't answer, fetching his discarded lightsaber from the floor and bundling it into Luke's unwilling hands.

"Just tell me one thing," Rey says, stepping right up to Kylo and tilting her head back to look into the clear visor of the vacuum suit. The HUD outlines her face in faint white lines, the readout informing him of her species, height, body temperature.

Kylo looks down at her, not quite afraid of what she's going to say next.

What she says next is, "Do you love him?"

Kylo opens his mouth to reply, but no sound comes out. From next to him, Luke says, "I think the answer to that is pretty obvious."

But Rey doesn't break Kylo's gaze. She stares at him from under lowered brows and says, "I need to hear him say it." She's looking at him as if he's killed Han Solo all over again, the sad and disappointed look of someone who recognized approaching disaster and did nothing to stop it, and here she is, again, the world going to pieces around her.

All for Hux. Hux, who killed the last hope she hadn't even known she had when he slaughtered the New Republic fleet.

He's still figuring out what to say when Luke interrupts. "You'd better be sure about this, kid. If we fail, it's a high price to pay for someone you don't love with everything you are."

Kylo glances at him, then looks at the floor, clenching his fists, and stays quiet.

Luke inclines his head and takes Rey's hand. Together, they walk down the corridor and back towards the cockpit, their footsteps fading into silence. In a while, he feels the tug of Luke's power on the edge of his mind. And then he turns towards the escape hatch and towards Hux.

 

\---

 

Out of the thousand million possible ways there are to die, Hux never imagined that this would be his. In order of his preference (not that he's spent too much time thinking about his own demise), being assassinated by a member of the Resistance in the middle of a public speech was top of his list. Dying of old age was unlikely, but preferable to his number three - being killed in action (which, to be honest, was probably less likely than dying of old age). Sacrificing his own life to self-destruct his beloved ship in the stomach(s) of life-destroying creatures from the deepest abyss was, to be fair, not one of the options he'd ever considered. But if it were, it would be pretty far down on the list.

He'd known, when the Finalizer went dark, that this is how it would end. The moment the power had died, engines slowing to a stop with a deepening whine and vents hissing as the oxygen supply cut out, he'd known with absolute certainty that he was going to die today. He hadn't even been surprised when Mitaka came to him, hat clenched in front of his chest and voice trembling over the words "autopilot" and "system failure". Instead, he'd said he would handle it, watched Mitaka bei bundled onto one of the shuttles with Phasma, and folded his hands behind his back in lieu of saluting them as they shot off into space, because honestly, they could have at least offered to stay behind with him. (He'd have refused, but it would have been nice to know they cared). Then he'd turned and made his way slowly through the Finalizer, trailing one gloved hand along the bulkheads leading to the command bridge.

And here he is now, all by himself at the end of everything. He sighs lightly.

All things considered, there are, probably, worse ways to go. He allows himself to imagine, for a moment, a world _after_ the Deimos: Organa and her band of absurdly sentimental minions would spread the word of his noble sacrifice - Armitage Hux, saviour of the Galaxy - and his name would go down in infamy as the man who took billions of lives, but saved so many more.

His breath puffs into a white cloud as he exhales, burying his hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat. It fogs on the transparisteel viewport, washing the reflection of his face in crystal-grey before obscuring it completely.

No, he doesn't want to die. But if he has to, this is not a bad way to go.

It's colder than usual on the bridge of the Finalizer. The bright, clinical white lights set vertically into the hull of the bridge pulse slowly, red now, the dire color of something having gone horribly wrong. Hux had killed the klaxon as soon as he got to the bridge; he's the only one left up here now, and he already knows things have gone to shit, thank you very much. The rest of the bridge is plunged in shifting red-black-red shadows, display screens blank and consoles dark.

Detecting his presence, the Finalizer has routed its protocols to isolate life support to the bridge, dedicating the least amount of emergency power to preserving his life. The rest of the ship lies cold, dark, drifting slowly towards the Deimos, towards death.

No, he's not too upset at the thought of dying, as vexing as the manner of it may be. Instead, it's the blanketing sense of familiarity that bothers him - the feeling of déjà vu, that he's been here before; felt the approach of his own death looming just on the edges of his sight, the very corners of his vision flooded with shadow. Even the stars disappearing in front of him had been the same, in the dream: slowly fading, one by one, leaving only blackness spreading before the creatures. In the dream, he'd been scared - terrified, really - rooted to his command chair, unable to move with paralyzing fear. He's not scared, now, not really. But he finds the fact that he saw this happening in a dream deeply disconcerting.

He's absolutely convinced that this is somehow Kylo's fault. Hux had been fairly certain it shouldn't be possible to gain Force abilities by proxy, by fucking a Force user. Now he's not so sure. He wouldn't put it past Kylo to have insinuated himself into his life in this aspect, too, having already wormed himself into every other part of Hux's existence.

He tries to put the thought of Kylo out of his mind. The Finalizer is too far away from the Millennium Falcon now to see it, but if he squints his eyes a bit and lets his focus drift, he can almost imagine one of the thousand shimmering silver stars in the far-off distance seems a little brighter, a bit more solid, like durasteel glinting in the night. He's always been terrible at goodbyes, having found himself with precious little time and even less tolerance for sentimentality. But saying goodbye to _him_ over the comm had been... more difficult than he'd like to admit. Words had stuck in his throat; he hadn't even really been sure what he'd wanted to say. And then it was suddenly over, and Kylo was gone.

He sighs, leaning forward to press his forehead against the cold plastisteel of the viewport and closing his eyes. His hat slips backward, then tumbles to the floor. Around him, shadows shift to red, and back to black. The thing about near death, Hux is starting to realize, is that it tends to make one think. For him, it had come as quite a shock to suddenly become aware that somehow, what had started simply as a way to manipulate Kylo Ren into helping him take control of the First Order had evolved into soft touches and warm kisses and something dangerously close to _feelings_ for Kylo's violence and his temper and his ridiculous lopsided face.

He shakes his head, straightening up and trying to push the thought of him out of his mind. Kylo is on the Falcon, far away from the Deimos. He's safe, alive. He'll go on without Hux, hopefully take his place as the Order's leader and finish what Hux started by restoring the Galaxy to its rightful order. (Hopefully. This is Kylo Ren, after all; as unpredictable as a natural disaster and just as catastrophic.)

He bends to collect his hat and pushes it back into place. A lifetime of cautious emotional detachment and strategic, meticulously planned trysts, careful never to get caught up in the tangled mess of relationships; he'll be damned if he gets caught spending the last minutes of his life _pining_. And for _him_ , of all people. Preposterous.

Fog creeps up the bottom edges of the viewports lining the hull of the bridge, the cold atmosphere outside clamoring around the ship. In the distance, the Falcon-star glitters. Hux looks away from it, down the angular lines of the Finalizer, dotted with satellite receivers and cannon mounts and tiny little viewports, slanting to an elegant point aimed straight at the creatures.

His eyes flicker up, but he can't do it: he can't look at them. Blinking furiously, his gaze slides down again, to the very tip of the Finalizer, cast in a bright purple glow - from this close, the translucent fire around the creatures burns bright and hot, fueled by the Force being channeled into them. The ship's ion drives, still active by manual override of the emergency shutdown protocols, whine underneath Hux's boots, straining against the outward push of the Deimos' energy field.

Hux stares at the hull of his ship, eyes edging away from the colossal tentacles writhing and twisting around each other just ahead, straining towards the Finalizer as if pulling her into their embrace. He takes another deep breath, watching it mist on the viewport, obscuring the faintly glimmering light of his imagined Falcon-star. Then he forces himself to look up: if he is to die today, he'll be damned if he goes out without at least having the courage to look at the things about to kill him.

Cracked, black skin and a purple blaze like the sun's corona, writhing and contorted masses of tentacle-like limbs, twisting and stretching towards him. Glimpses of a massive, cavernous mouth filled with more teeth than should be able to fit... he blinks at the control panel set into the wall below the viewport, his mind reeling with strange, sibilant whispers and a low and immense sound, just on the edge of hearing. He swallows, breathing hard, and shakes his head slightly as if to clear it from the madness that lurks just out of sight, from the insanity of trying to comprehend how it could be possible for these creatures to even exist.

When he manages to look up again, his eyes catch on the red numbers reflecting in reverse in the viewport - a display set into the hull of the bridge behind him, counting down. Four minutes left. It's so quiet, now; quiet enough to hear the tick of the emergency lights as they change color, for the scuff of his boot to echo on the bridge when he shifts his weight.

At the very edge of his peripheral vision, a thick tentacle curls around the tip of the Finalizer, slithering over the hull, its very tip crawling towards her belly. A communication tower crumbles under its weight, splinters of grey durasteel and silver wiring floating off into space.

Hux takes his hat off and runs a hand through his hair before jamming it back onto his head. Then he turns away sharply, clenching his hands into fists as he marches down the bridge to the flight control deck; a series of large display panels set above a keyboard built out of the hull. The console pits lining the bridge are plunged into deep shadow by the dim emergency lighting, gaping dark craters lined with dead displays and cables coiling down into the black. He firmly ignores the red cascading numbers of the countdown, focusing instead on the Finalizer's flight controls: the happy, almost too-bright blue displays informing him of the ship's coordinates and thrust velocity and trajectory. He taps on the centre display to open the ion drive controls, using his forefinger and middle finger to move the slider in the centre of the screen from the bottom to the middle. Correspondingly, the ship shudders slightly as the drive engages, and Hux has to brace slightly against the sudden forward thrust.

He glances to the side, out the viewport again; more tentacles have wrapped around the ship, wriggling through her support beams and snaking toward the bridge tower. And these slowly-crawling tentacles slithering over his ship like the black shadows of snakes, pulling her in, writhing around her; this is new. This hadn't been in his dream. It breaks the sense of familiarity tugging at the back of his mind, dissipating the last lingering sense of déjà vu. Maybe it hadn't been a Force-vision after all. One can hope.

He looks away from the viewport, reaches over to recalibrate the ship's trajectory slightly, and slides the ion drive controller all the way to the top. The Finalizer shudders again, the deep groan of the engines echoing eerily in the silence as she pushes forward. No sense in delaying the inevitable. Now that he's gotten used to the idea of dying, he actually finds himself feeling somewhat at peace. Resigned to his fate, but perhaps also slightly relieved by it.

Turning away from the display, he walks to his command chair and sits down at the head of the bridge. Lights phase from red to black. His breath mists in front of him. In the corner of his eye, the red numbers of the timer tick down, LED milliseconds cascading like sand over the steadily decreasing display. It's very cold.

"Well then." He sits back, pressing his hands into his pockets. Here he is. This is it; his final moments. He wonders if his life will flash before his eyes, though there are really some parts of it he'd rather not revisit.

On the other hand, all things considered, he supposes he hasn't done too badly: he's the youngest general in Imperial history, the main engineer behind the completion of Starkiller Base, and single-handedly responsible for wiping out the main seat of power of the New Republic and bringing the Galaxy one step closer to peace. And, now, he'll be responsible for saving it, too - if this works. If he were the kind of person to believe in the afterlife, he might be looking forward to meeting his father again, if only to flaunt these accomplishments in his face.

Somewhere to his left, the countdown reaches two minutes. Unable to face the Deimos, he stares at what remains of the stars outside the viewport absently, trying to find the Falcon-star again. The silence in the bridge bears down on him with an almost physical pressure. The emergency lights flash, red, black, red. Nothing to do but wait, now, for the end.

And then, because it is of course too much to ask just to be left in peace in the final moments of his life, the bridge door slides open behind him with a sibilant, hydraulic hiss. Hux stops breathing, pulse leaping into his throat. Fear paralyzes him for a second, washing over him in a wave of freezing cold. The hair on the back of his neck raises, adrenaline pulsing through him. He swallows dryly, jaw clenched, staring fixedly at the empty space in front of him -- and then blinks, because honestly, he's being ridiculous. He's going to die anyway. What possible difference would it make to suddenly come face to face with the admittedly terrifying apparition from his dream? In any case, he reasons, it's probably nothing more than a hallucinatory by-product of being in such mind-warping proximity to the Deimos, anyway.

So he turns around, slowly, though he already knows what he's going to see: the figure in the white enviro-suit is taller than he was in Hux's dream, broader. He steps forward to let the door hiss shut behind him, and the bridge reflects in the chrome visor covering his face, a warped, red-black mirror oval centering on Hux's command chair, stretched almost comically around the curve of the mask.

Hux stares, frozen in place, hands clenched on the arms of the chair. If this is an hallucination, it is _very_ realistic: tiny lights indicating switches set into panels on its forearms blink green and blue as it reaches up, the flashing red of the bridge's emergency lights bathing the ribbed material of the suit in ridged shadow. The figure twists the suit's helmet slightly to disengage it with a hiss, its chrome visor bleeding clear. And as it lifts the helmet off its face, Hux realizes that this is no hallucination. It's worse: it's Kylo fucking Ren.

He stares, disbelief warring with a kind of warm ache from seeing his face warring with worry followed immediately by a very deep and very intense rage. No. There is no way Kylo is on the Finalizer. He's safe on the Falcon, alive and far away from the Deimos.

In the doorway, Kylo is breathing hard, panting as though he's been running, sweat beading on his forehead and dripping down his temple. He is, in fact, really here. And just... No. No no no. There's no way he's this _stupid_...

Hux surges out of his chair and whirls on Kylo, floundering for words. His hands curl into claws in front of him, and, unable to settle on just one of the litany of objections he has, an exasperated "You imbecile!" is the only thing that comes out of his mouth.

Kylo blinks, pausing in the act of tucking the helmet under his arm, then frowns slightly. "...Hello to you too?"

On the wall between them, the timer ticks down to one minute.

Hux hisses, angrily, "What do you think you're doing?", and stalks up to Kylo with the full intent of either punching him in the face or kissing him (he hasn't quite decided yet).

Kylo actually backs away a step, lifting the helmet up in front of him protectively with an uncertain "Hux..."

Hux closes the gap, grabbing the helmet from him and tossing it to the ground angrily. It echoes as it crashes to the floor at their feet. "You can't," - he shoves Kylo with both hands - "Be here. You're supposed to be on the Falcon."

"Hux, I--"

"What the hell are you thinking?" Hux snaps, shoving Kylo again, hard.

Kylo reels back, looking shocked, and then hurt. A drop of sweat trails down the side of his face. He's still panting, and he swallows around it and tries to say "Hux, just listen--"

But Hux talks over him: "Now we're both going to die, and for what? You were supposed to be on the Falcon. You were supposed to be far away from all of this. I was quite content with dying here today if it meant I could keep you from harm." And then, because that sounds dangerously like he's close to admitting something he's not quite ready to, he scowls and changes course: "Who's going to rule the First Order if both of us are dead?"

"Who cares about the First Order?" Kylo yells, and Hux's mouth snaps shut with an audible click. He swallows.

Kylo takes a step toward him, suddenly intense. "You think any of that matters to me without you?" He's still breathing hard, staring at Hux earnestly, and suddenly Hux doesn't know what to say, can't seem to find the words, his mouth gone dry.  A diagonal shadow cuts across the side of Kylo's face as one enormous tentacle wraps around the bridge tower, obscuring part of the viewport. Durasteel support beams groan under its weight, shuddering as they start to buckle. Hux stumbles a bit as the bridge pitches, grabbing onto Kylo's arm. Kylo grips his elbow, steadying him, and peers into his face with those sad eyes of his.

"What happened to being President of the Universe?" he implores, and when Hux makes a face at that ridiculous title, Kylo says, "If you die, where do I go? Who is left for me to follow? It was supposed to be both of us. Never just me." He takes another step forward, close enough now for the control pack on his chest to bump against Hux. "You're an idiot if you think I'm going to let you leave me like everyone else."

Hux looks away from him, squeezing his eyes shut. He's too angry at Kylo to form a coherent sentence, too annoyed at him for coming here and dying when he should have been safe, should have been far away from all of this, alive.

"Kylo," he starts, stammering, "You...! I--" And if his voice wavers a bit it is because of anger, and definitely not because he finds himself blinking back tears. When it looks like Kylo might try to say something else he snaps, "First of all, you killed everyone who left you!"

Kylo growls in frustration, biting out, "Now is not the time for semantics!"

Hux takes a deep breath, scowling up at him and speaking slowly, just in case Kylo isn't keeping up. "This is madness. We are both going to die here, do you understand that?"

"No," Kylo says, "We're not. I'm here to rescue you."

Hux stares at him. "Have you lost. Your mind." It's clear to him now. Channeling the Force into the Deimos has scrambled Kylo's brains. That's the only explanation. "You want to rescue. Me." he continues, incredulously, voice getting unintentionally louder so that he is almost shouting by the time he finishes saying, "From the inside of a nuclear blast big enough to generate a sun!"

"... Uh huh." Kylo nods, like it's obvious. He's looking at Hux expectantly, probably waiting for him to thank him. The rest of the bridge goes suddenly dark, plunged into deep shadow as the Finalizer slips into the cavernous maw of the Deimos. The countdown trickles into its last seconds, and Kylo is still looking at him, illuminated only in flashes now by the red emergency lights, seeming so calm, so collected.

Kylo asks, softly, "Don't you trust me?"

Hux stares at him, searching his eyes in the brief intervals of red illumination, and asks, softly, "... You honestly think this is possible?"

"Yes," Kylo says without hesitation. "The Force has shown me the way."

And deep in the pit of Hux's treacherous chest, a tiny seed of hope starts to bloom. He clamps a gloved hand over his mouth to stifle his exasperated sigh, sagging back a bit. Kylo believes he can do this. He actually believes he can save them. Hux's breath clouds between his fingers. He doesn't reply, looking away from the expectation in Kylo's eyes.

Around their feet, energy starts to swirl, shimmering in the intermittent pulses of red light, luminescent and sheer. What can be seen of the command bridge around them blurs into warped and smeared forms as if seen through waves of shimmering heat. It churns around them, building from the ground up, higher and faster until it encloses them completely in a tight, egg-like shell, a glimmering hurricane of energy encasing them in a protective shield. The physical rush of it whips Kylo's hair around his face like wind and tugs Hux's greatcoat around his ankles, and it is very close and very hot, pressing in around them, almost searing.

Hux starts to reach out towards it, the bones of his fingers aching as he gets closer to the energy shielding them, but stops himself just short of touching it, hand curling into a fist. He shakes his head at the madness of this, at the sheer insanity of even coming up with this impossible plan in the first place. But he wants to believe it can work. He wants to believe Kylo can protect him, though all of his instincts  are screaming at him that he's wrong. He says, "You are completely insane," and looks up at Kylo, "But I trust you."

And Kylo grabs him, crushing him to his chest in a hug that knocks the breath out of Hux. Hux hesitates, then slowly puts his arms around him, pressing his face against the warm rubber material of the suit. "This is going to fail," he mutters into Kylo's neck "You know that, right? We are both going to die, and if the last thing I see in this world is your ridiculous face, I am going to find you in whatever Force-based fucking afterlife you believe in and haunt the fuck out of you for--"

"Hux," Kylo cuts him off, pushing him away by the shoulders to look at him, "Shut up."

From the corner of his eye, Hux sees the counter reach zero. He tenses, clutching onto Kylo's forearms, and surges up to kiss him.

And then everything goes white around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The amazing [flurgburgler](http://flurgburgler.tumblr.com/post/164102431963/another-commission-for-sarensen-for-their) did another commission for me, of the moment just before their final kiss:
> 
>  


	11. Epilogue: Armitage Hux, Professional Asshole

_[[ D'Qar R.A. outpost security feed, medical bay, FC17.2 ]]_ _  
_ _[[ Galactic Standard Time, offset 473 / 11:24 ]]_

Bright, sterile white light illuminates the small, windowless room, casting the corners of pale whitewashed walls in harsh, angular shadow. A narrow bed lines one wall. Durasteel beams arch over it, empty now of the tube of glass that had enclosed the bed until a little while ago: a medihub, metal support beams gleaming in the bright light. The base of one arch, where it connects to the structure of the bed, houses a transparent projection display, hovering slightly above the durasteel and vibrating with signal distortion. It displays statistical indicators of the status of the bed's single occupant: heart rate, blood pressure, breathing.

The bed's occupant is a young man with black hair and a jagged scar splitting his face diagonally. He is very pale, with dark purple smudges under his eyes. He's been asleep for fifty-one hours, twenty-two minutes, and thirty-three seconds. His eyelids occasionally flutter with dreams. His body is covered by a silver and white thermoblanket, tucked underneath his arms. Long, draping tubes disappear beneath white patches on his forearm. They feed nutrients and medication into his system from a panel set into the wall above his head, lined with controls and switches and blinking lights.

Most of the space in the room is taken up by the narrow medihub and its occupant. In the little space there is between the bed and the wall, there is a small, squat table, white and bare except for the glass jar sitting in the exact center of it, and the high-backed wooden chair, one corner pressed flush into the mattress. A man sits in it. One leg bounces nervously. On the other knee, he balances an ashtray, into which he taps ash off the cigarette he's smoking. His hand shakes visibly. There are eight cigarette stubs in the tray. His cheeks are dusted with red stubble. A long fringe hangs messily over one eye. He wears brown breeches and a green tunic zipped up to his chin, a thick belt cinching his waist. He keeps glancing over his shoulder at the door, hidden just beyond the camera's field of vision in the bottom right corner.

When the bed's occupant starts to stir, the heart rate monitor speeds up slightly unevenly, and the man sits forward, leaning over to watch with an expectant expression.

The patient turns his head slightly, eyes flickering behind closed lids as he struggles to open them. He takes a deep breath through his mouth; swallows thickly. When his eyes flutter open, he immediately squeezes them shut again, wincing slightly against the light. He has to clear his throat twice before he manages to say: "Are we dead?"

The man with red hair sneers. "Do I look like some kind of ghost?"

The patient in the bed pries his eyes open, squinting a bit. "Maybe one of those deep-space apparitions they make horror holos about." His voice is hoarse, deep.

The other man huffs, crossing his arms. "Well, if you're lucid enough to crack jokes, I guess your life must be out of immediate danger."

The patient sniffs lightly, clears his throat again. "Where...?"

"D'Qar," the red-haired man takes a drag on his cigarette, exhaling smoke with the words, "The Resistance Base."

The man with the scar peers at him. His voice is starting to sound a bit steadier, and he can keep his eyes open for longer now. He frowns a bit. "...You smoke?"

"Used to," the red-haired man replies, turning the cigarette in his hand back and forth with a thoughtful look, "Back in the Academy. It's not exactly a habit sustainable on starships."

"Oh."

"My father used to hate the damned things. Always said there are quicker ways to commit suicide, and less foul-smelling ones. So of course I took it as a personal challenge to smoke as many of them as I could manage. Ended up with my own little operation. For about two years I supplied cigarras to the whole Academy. Didn't get caught once, and--"

"Did it work?" the patient interrupts. When the other man falls quiet, he prompts, "The Deimos. Did we kill them?"

The other man looks at him quietly, then puts his arms around himself, holding the cigarette away from his elbow in two fingers. His leg starts bouncing again. He nods his chin to the low table beside the bed, and to the jar sitting on top of it. Inside the jar is a single lump of grey, pockmarked flesh, about the size of a human hand, held suspended somehow in the air. The flesh is faded and lifeless, and it glows with a very dim, faint purple light.

"There were pieces of them _everywhere_ ," the red-haired man says, when the man in the bed has craned his neck around to look, "In your hair, in my coat - which was _lovely_. Your Resistance scientists are looking at some of them now, trying to figure out where these things came from, what they were... if there are more of them..." He glances over his shoulder at the door.

The man in the bed squeezes his eyes shut, then tries to look at the jar again. He can't quite seem to manage it. He shakes his head slightly, lifting his eyes to the jar again, but they slide away, the heart rate monitor leaping unsteadily. Eventually he gives up and turns away entirely, looking back at the red-haired man. He says, "We made it."

The red-haired man shrugs one shoulder. "They had to wait for the blast to clear. Radiation levels were off the charts. Which, by the way, if that causes all my hair to fall out I am holding you personally responsible."

"You look okay to me. Nice pants."

"You're delirious."

"No, they make your ass look great."

"You can't see my arse from there. Anyway," the red-haired man takes one last drag on his cigarette before stubbing it out next to the other cigarette corpses in the ashtray, "They eventually came for us in the Falcon. We were just... drifting. Entirely unprotected. In space."

When the patient interrupts him with, "Not entirely unprotected. I used the Force", the red-haired man rolls his eyes, pausing to glare for a second before continuing, "Apparently it took them almost more effort to break open your Force shell than it did to kill the creatures."

The man in the bed rests back and closes his eyes with a slight, content-looking smile. "I did it, Hux. I saved you."

The red-haired man shakes his head, leaning down to put the ashtray on the ground next to the chair. He looks in the direction of the door quickly, before straightening up. "You could have put the entire Galaxy at risk with your actions."

The patient shakes his head, the smile fading as he starts drifting back into unconsciousness. "...saved... you..."

The red-haired man sighs slightly, hesitating, before reaching out and putting one hand lightly on the patient's wrist where it rests on top of the thermoblanket. "Yes, Kylo. You did."

The beeping of the heart rate monitor slows, the patient's breaths evening out as he slips back into sleep.

  
  


_[[ GST.473 / 03:16 ]]_

The tiny med-bay is dark, bathed in hues of luminous green through the camera's night-vision filters. Indistinct and blurry shapes are shrouded in grainy static, flaring almost to white where the hover-display set into one durasteel arch still shows the medical statistics of the medihub's occupant in happy, bright LED numbers.

The patient stirs, sheets rustling in the dark as he lifts his head slightly off the pillows. The red-haired man is lying forward in his chair, arms crossed on the edge of the narrow bed with his head pillowed lightly on them. His face is pressed lightly into the patient's hip. He snores, softly.

Shades of green play over the patient's arm as he lifts it with some difficulty. It shakes slightly. He ignores the tug of the drips still connected to his wrist to lay his hand on top of the sleeping man's head. The snoring stops, and the red-haired man opens his eyes. In a few moments he lifts his head. The patient's hand slips off the top of his head, coming to rest on his cheek. And though it's hard to see in the dark, the red-head smiles at him, a genuine smile, a soft sleepy smile, eyes wrinkling slightly at the corners.

It's quiet for a long time. The patient's voice is soft and very deep, treacling with sleep when he eventually says, "I saw you. This you. In a vision."

The red-haired man says, "Go back to sleep."

The patient reaches up to ruffle his hair lightly, then drops his hand, closing his eyes. Minutes pass, and eventually he drifts off again. The red-haired man waits until the heart-rate monitor returns to the steady, slow beat of sleep, then gets up, chair scraping lightly over the floor. He leans over to kiss the patient's forehead lightly.

  
  


_[[ GST.473 / 14:57 ]]_

The red-haired man is sitting back in his chair, legs crossed at the knee, reading a book. On the floor next to him sit an empty bowl and spoon. His ashtray has been emptied and refilled twice.

The man with the scarred face has just woken up. He's been watching the red-haired man quietly. He says, "You're still here."

The red-haired man folds the book over one finger. "Where else would I be?"

The patient considers this, then shrugs one shoulder. "I'm just surprised. Thought you'd be wanting to get back to the Order."

The red-haired man glances over his shoulder at the door. "Yes, well. I would. But that's a bit difficult at present."

"Why?" The patient cranes his neck, trying to sit up a bit to look out the door, "Did they threaten to make you give me a sponge bath?". Shadows move on the floor and the very foot of the bed, cast by figures moving just out of sight in the doorway. One of the shadows holds a blaster rifle crooked in one elbow.

The red-haired man rolls his eyes, then settles back in his chair, opening the book again and continuing lightly, "As horrifying as that would be. No. Apparently the fact that I saved the Galaxy doesn't quite pardon me from mass murder. Your mother has graciously agreed not to have me summarily imprisoned, but I can't leave this room without supervision. It's really all very tedious. If I had known--"

He pauses, here, turning to look at the door, where a deeper shadow breaks the square of light cast by the corridor outside before a short woman dressed in a deep blue blouse and grey breeches steps into view. Her hair is braided in an intricate pattern wrapping around her head twice. Her sleeves are rolled up to just underneath her elbows.

She folds her hands together in front of her chest and says, "Oh, Ben," her voice soft and coloured with emotion, "You're awake."

The red-haired man pushes his chair back and stands, abandoning his book on the foot of the bed before moving out of the way to give her room. He presses his back against the wall near the door, staring at the nape of the woman's neck.

The woman moves to the bed, standing close to the patient's shoulder. Her shadow falls over him diagonally, hiding part of his face. She reaches out, almost as if to touch his arm, but hesitates at the last moment, dropping her hand.

The man with the scarred face looks everywhere but at this woman: at the opposite wall, at the ceiling, at the drip tubes still connected to his arm. When the silence has stretched for a very long time, he starts, "I'm..." - a slight hesitation - "... fine."

"What you did was incredibly brave," the woman tells him with a grave look. "Stupid as hell, but... I guess you take after your father in that regard."

The patient winces, not quite schooling his features back to placidity fast enough to hide it.

Behind the woman, the red-haired man is staring at the back of her head, fixedly. He hasn't looked away once since she entered. His eyes narrow slightly.

The man in the medihub bed smoothes his hands over the thermoblanket, looking down at the rumpled cloth. He sounds tired when he asks, "So. What now?"

The woman sighs slightly. She tucks an errant strand of hair behind her ear. "The most important thing now is to get you back on your feet. Rey only just woke up yesterday. Luke says none of you will be able to access the Force again--"

"What?" the patient exclaims, sitting up fast enough for one of his pillows to drop to the floor.

The woman holds out both hands placatingly. "Just for a while... until your bodies and your minds have completely healed. It's just temporary."

This seems to go some way towards mollifying the patient, who slowly lies back again.

The woman continues, "And then I suppose there will have to be some sort of trial--"

She pauses mid-sentence, frowning slightly, then turns her head to look over her shoulder in the red-haired man's direction. But he's not standing against the wall anymore. He's right behind her. Before she can move, he's grabbed her against his chest, right arm locking her into place against him. His left hand presses a long, curved knife against the soft flesh under her jaw.

The woman's hands fly up, pulling on the arm around her chest, but he towers over her, and his grip is like a vice. "What is the meaning of this?" she bites out, twisting her body to try and get free.

In the medihub, the patient struggles to sit up. "Hux. What are you doing."

"Leaving," the red-haired man replies, tugging the woman a bit tighter against him. Her blouse tugs free of her breeches, ruffling over her thighs. She's short enough for the back of her head to press against his chest, under the collarbone. Her struggling pulls some of her hair free of her braids; it drapes over the redhead's wrist.

"You won't get away with this," she bites out between her teeth.

"Actually," the red-haired man replies, looking over his shoulder as he drags her back towards the door, "With no one capable of using the Force, and an important hostage your men won't risk harming by shooting at me, I think I stand a fairly good chance."

The man with the scarred face has made it to his feet, swaying. He grabs onto the edge of the bed. He is bare-chested, barefoot, wearing only a pair of loose grey slacks tied at the hips with a drawstring. He flings one arm out, fingers in a claw, then cries out in pain, crumpling over and clutching at his head. He stays like this for only a moment before fighting to right himself and tearing at the drips in his arm until they pull free, tumbling to the ground. Liquid starts to pool slowly out of them.

He is staring at the red-haired man and his hostage, now out of view of the camera. "Hux. Can we talk about this?"

When there is no answer, he stumbles out of the room after them.

  
  


_[[ D'Qar R.A. outpost security feed, medbay corridor c, FC22.4 ]]_ _  
_ _[[ GST.473 / 15:02 ]]_

The corridor outside is long and arched, a tunnel hewn deep into the bedrock of the planet. Its cold concrete walls are dotted at regular intervals with round lights casting long shadows on the curved roof. Several doors line the left side of the corridor before it bends and disappears from view. Outside one door, two guards dressed in Resistance uniforms stand at attention, blaster rifles held at the ready across their chests. The only sound in the corridor is the electric hum of lights, the soft scuff of a boot against the concrete floor as one guard shifts his weight.

Then shadows scurry across the floor between them, accompanied by the brief sounds of a scuffle before the red-haired man bursts through the doorway, dragging the woman in the blue blouse backwards with him. Her feet slide on the ground as she fights for balance. Her hands pull at his forearms, struggling to get free.

The guards jump, exclaiming loudly in surprise. Barely a second passes before they assess the situation and both train their rifles on the man and his hostage. They are yelling, "Let her go!" and "Drop your weapon!" and "Stand down!"

The red-haired man hauls the woman closer to his chest. He presses the knife tightly enough against her throat for a thin, red line to form there, a drop of blood trailing into her collar. The man snarls, "Drop your rifles or I slit her throat," and when the guards don't immediately comply, he heaves on her again. Her feet slip a bit and she cries out as the knife slides up against the bottom of her chin. The red-haired man says, "I'll do it. I swear."

The guards glance at each other uncertainly, but when they look back, the woman nods at them, very slightly. Slowly, they lower their rifles.

The red-haired man snarls, "On the ground!" and the guards drop their weapons, raising their hands. He backs his hostage away from them, down the corridor.

The man with the scarred face and black hair appears in the doorway. He's breathing hard, leaning on the doorframe for support. With gritted teeth, he calls after them, "Hux!"

But they have already disappeared from view.

  
  


_[[ D'Qar R.A. outpost security feed, mess hall, FC1.9 ]]_ _  
_ _[[ GST.473 / 15:05 ]]_

A haphazard collection of tables is strewn about the room, all with mismatched chairs as though they were scavenged together from several different sources. A long bar lines one brown-painted wall, with upturned crates for seats and dotted with chipped bowls and tin cups of various colours. Long chains drip from the ceiling, connected to small metal cages, each housing a low-wattage light bulb. They emit a dim light, casting the room in shades of orange and yellow.

The large display screens lining the opposite wall are, by contrast, the pinnacle of new technology. They glow neon blue and orange, displaying the schematics of some kind of structure that seems to be built down into the planet's core, and a series of rectangular video feeds showing an outdoors docking bay filled with X-Wings, what looks like a conference room housing a large, central round holo-table, its controls dark, and a view of a large, open field from the top of some kind of grassy hill.

The bar has a single occupant; a young man with dark skin, wearing the same standard-issue clothing as most of the people on the base. He is watching the screens idly, pushing a tin cup side to side between his hands.

A commotion at the doorway draws his attention. He stands, quickly, when he sees the red-haired man and his hostage weaving through the tables, heading towards a pair of large, open double doors framing a glaring pale square of white - the outside world.

"G-general Hux?" the dark-skinned man exclaims, staring.

"Ah," says the red-haired man, tugging on the woman lightly when she starts to slip out of his grasp, "336. There you are. I assume this must come as a bit of a surprise."

The dark-skinned man doesn't say anything.

"As you can see," the red-haired man continues, "We're leaving. If you would be so kind as to head outside with me and commandeer us a vessel."

The other man blinks, once. "We uh. We're doing what, now?"

"At your convenience, 336!" the red-haired man barks, heaving the still-struggling woman along with him.

"Sir!" the other man snaps to attention, thumping his fist on his chest in salute before hurrying over to them.

From the other side of the room, a man appears in the doorway. He has dark hair, and is dressed in neatly-pressed brown slacks and a green military tunic, a rank badge on his chest. A round, orange-and-white astromech droid trundles in behind him, bumping into his legs with a soft surprised chirp when the man stops in his tracks at the sight that greets him within. The man starts to say, "What in the blazes--?", cutting off with a loud exclamation as the patient from the medbay crashes into him from behind, shoving him out the way.

The man with the scarred face barrels into one of the tables, knocking it over. He's breathing hard. He pants, "Hux, you can't do this."

The droid lets out a series of beeps, then barrels towards the red-haired man and his hostage. The man in the uniform rights himself and leaps over the fallen table, taking off after the droid. "That's right, buddy. He's not!"

The red-haired man can't get out of the way fast enough with the extra weight of the woman dragging him down. He stumbles back slightly and the droid and uniformed man are almost on top of him, and he throws out his right hand blindly to ward them off, still pressing the knife into the woman's throat with his left.

And both the droid and the man go flying backward, an invisible force slamming into them and flinging them away from the red-haired man and into the bar with a loud crash.

The woman turns her head to stare at the red-haired man, wide-eyed. The scarred patient is gaping at him, open-mouthed. The red-haired man himself looks more shocked than either of them, staring fixedly at his right hand.

In the silence that follows, the sound of wood clacking and splintering is loud in the canteen as the uniformed man slowly starts to pry himself out of the wreckage of the bar. He says, staring, "Did you just. Use the Force?"

The red-haired man shakes his head quickly, grabbing the woman around the waist again as he recovers. He glances at the man with the scarred face, whose legs seem to have given way beneath him and who slumps now against one of the rickety chairs. The red-haired man says, "You'll come find me when you're stronger," and he phrases it like a statement, rather than a question.

"Hux..." the scarred man tries, "Please. It's over."

The red-haired man shakes his head. "It's not over till I say so."

He backs away with his hostage and disappears outside, his dark-skinned companion shutting the doors behind them.

The man in the uniform helps the rotund droid out of the splintered hole in the bar, then comes to stand next to the man with the scarred face, hands on his hips. From outside, there is the sound of a ship's engines powering up.

The droid beeps worriedly, rotating its eye module around to look up at the uniformed man. The man nods. "I agree. This is bad. He needs her to get off the base. But once he's free, he'll have no use for her anymore..." He turns to glare accusingly at the man with the scarred face. "Well, lover boy. What do we do now?"

The man with the scarred face frowns. He flexes his hands, balls them into fists. Pushing away from his support, he glares at the door. The droid rolls back away from him slightly, and the man in the uniform lifts his hands in front of him, placatingly. But it's too late. Before he can say anything, the scarred patient turns, picks up the chair he'd been resting against, and throws it hard against the bar with an inarticulate growl. It crashes into the already wrecked wood. Plates and cups cascade to the floor, some shattering. And then the man's legs seem to give way beneath him weakly and he slumps to the ground.

The camera flickers; the feed goes dark.

  


_[[ end of security feed disc 2 ]]_

_[[ proceed to disc 3 Y/N? >> ]]_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [{end credits theme song (the *amazing* chorus of which was the inspiration for Hux's last line) for your listening pleasure}](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORs1YGiysY)
> 
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> 
> I can't believe this incredible journey has come to an end :o When I started this back in August last year, I had no idea that it would evolve into what has been one of the most fun experiences of my life. It has been a wild ride from start to finish and I really just had the most amazing time writing it. I have become insanely attached to this universe and these characters, and even if this never gets a fuckton of kudos or any art or anything it wouldn't even matter to me, because I had SO much fun writing it :D It will always hold a very special place in my heart. The struggle of writing without a beta continues to be Too Real(tm), but it has made me learn so much about my writing and the whole process of planning and editing, so in a way, it’s actually kind of been a blessing.
> 
> To my best friend G, thank you for being my reason to keep writing. You're the best support and inspiration a person could ask for. Again, sorry for all the dick. >_>
> 
> Thank you to everyone who regularly commented on each chapter. Seeing your names pop up in my notifications always gave me the biggest smile.
> 
> To celebrate the end of this amazing journey, I’m holding a mini fic giveaway! If you want to participate, leave a comment here (or an [ask on tumblr](http://ad-aphelion.tumblr.com/ask), anons are open!) with a prompt before 10 March, and I will pick one with a random generator and write fic for it.
> 
> The Sound Of Broken Glass will (probably) return in the thrilling(?) conclusion to the trilogy, most likely featuring tons more Extraness, Leia being thoroughly Fed Up(tm) with all these shenanigans, and Force-sensitive!Hux, oh my! (But before then I will be participating in the Reverse Big Bang; so it might be a bit of a wait...)
> 
> In the meantime, if you liked Deimos, please consider leaving a kudos or a comment, it would mean the world to me :)


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